NOKIA GAMES

Forget Chicago and Moulin Rouge and pretty much every other movie musical you can think of. The Nightmare Before Christmas is the best there is. In our humble opinion, at least, the 1993 film never gets old.

So we got quite excited by the prospect of a pre-Christmas mobile game based on Tim Burton's production. The licence offers endless possibilities and brilliant characters, like Zero the dog, Sally, the Major of Halloween Town, Oogie Boogie and Lock, Shock and Barrel.

But have any of them been used for the game? No, they haven't. Nightmare Before Christmas the game is a very different prospect to the film. Instead of sleigh riding, missile dodging or present making, its creator has decided to translate the experience into a puzzle game. Because, of course, Jack spends a lot of time solving puzzles and pushing pumpkins around in the movie – we must have been getting the popcorn during those segments.

Each level contains a number of presents scattered around it, and every one needs to be collected by Jack, then taken to his sack. Stages contain a selection of challenges, although once learnt, opponents and strategies for dealing with them are recycled throughout. So there are witches who need to be lured over a trap door to get rid of them, jack-in-the-boxes that must be blocked off by pushing an item in front of them, and lasers to shoot and zap enemies with.

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Concept-wise, it's actually not a bad game and it does include a lot of the cheery music from the film, backed by an assortment of suitably themed areas. But while the design of the puzzles is decent, their implementation isn't. It's tough to see what's going to kill you, so you're frequently taken by surprise by an instant death, while the controls are so imprecise it's too easy to over-push a block and ruin two minutes of gaming, or stand too close to an enemy and get yourself killed.

We'd also argue that any game that includes a 'Give up' option, as this one does, probably has issues. But with every pushed pumpkin having the potential to mess up an entire level, an undo option would have been more welcome. Without it, every level is a slog of trial and error, repetition and dropping dead on the spot.

Alas, the intelligence of the enemies offers little consolation, given that they doggedly follow your every move like hypnotised Rottweilers.

Okay, we could swallow the argument that a puzzle game can utilise very predictable AI, but some of the other sins this game commits aren't as digestible. Like not being able to tell which side of a jack-in-the-box is going to spring open at you, and sometimes being able to run past them and then not, depending on whether it suits that particular puzzle.

At its best, Nightmare Before Christmas does present some well thought-out puzzles, which get you thinking tactically and feeling some sense of satisfaction at having completed them. At its worst, it's so frustrating you often don't want to carry on. Luckily, the game does enable you to skip past a level to try another one in the section you're on when that happens.

Everything feels very basic, though. While the levels look nice enough, underneath them lies a very simple grid-based game, which feels much older than it should. And this notion is only enhanced by the unfair deaths and inconsistencies that often crop up.

If you're after a decent mobile puzzle game, there are plenty of better ones out there (take the recently reviewed Frantic Factory, for the first one that comes to mind). Even big Nightmare Before Christmas fans – that's us – aren't going to get much out of this other than the chance to watch Jack crumple and die countless times before giving up. Hardly the experience we were hoping to receive.



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