The Golden Compass
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| The Golden Compass

The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman's well-regarded fantasy novel about people with magic talking pets, is widely understood to be an anti-religious tract, a satirical take on Milton's biblical epic Paradise Lost in which Christian morality is turned on its head, so that goodness is bad and badness is good.

While we might conclude from playing the game of the film that developer Code Monkeys is trying to achieve the same kind of satire, this would be a generous interpretation. The Golden Compass is just badness. Huge badness

At some point, this review is going to descend into something like savagery, but in order to keep that grim spectacle at bay for as long as we can we'll take some time to look at the plot.

For the most part, you play as Lyra, a magically gifted schoolgirl embroiled in a fantasy adventure revolving around the golden compass of the title. Over the course of five levels, you need to steer Lyra from her home in Jordan College to the Ice Fields, by way of London, Trollesund, and Bolvangar. On the way, you also befriend a talking polar bear called Lorek. Most of you probably know all this.

Level one is both the hardest and the baddest (in its literal, rather than street, sense). You have to make your way from your bedroom in Jordan College to the top of the building, where the compass is for some reason lodged, and in doing so you encounter most of the gremlins that render The Golden Compass defunct.

After clambering onto the first rooftop, you're attacked by some pigeons. We don't want to appear sticklers, but this just isn't how pigeons behave, and even if they were aggressive they'd scarcely be dangerous. There's nothing wrong with stretching the truth for a game – mushrooms aren't nearly as dangerous in real life as they are to Mario, after all – but The Golden Compass's choices seem plain lazy.

Later in the level, you come across some perfectly unassuming adults – a cook and a waiter – and brushing against these characters also kills you, leaving you no choice but to stone them until they get out of the way. Later still, in London, you do this in full view of a roomful of people and nobody lifts a finger. It's rare that a game makes so little effort to conceal its nuts and bolts.

Control is straightforward. You move left and right with '4' and '6', jump and grab onto high platforms with '1', '2', and '3', and throw stones with '5'. Throwing stones is actually one of The Golden Compass's most sophisticated elements, as you have three levels of power at your command. Depending on how long you hold down '5', you'll either drop, lob, or chuck.

The jumping, though, is miserable, and there's a lot of this in level one. To reach the compass, you need to leap across a succession of floating platforms, and the arc of your leaps is such that many of the jumps require pixel-perfection.

Not only that, but the collision detection is so woolly you'll often drift past a platform you can plainly see you should be landing on, and since every time you miss you have to play the whole level again, your frustration soon reaches an almost pathological intensity.

Thankfully, there aren't many jumping sections in the rest of the game. Bizarrely, in fact, The Golden Compass actually gets easier as it goes on. Jordan College will take you several goes to get through, and London will possibly take you two, but after that it's plain sailing.

Trollesund is a leisurely ground-floor game of find-the-relic, Bolvangar is a 60-second dash through a densely-populated but otherwise unproblematic building, and the Ice Fields… Well, the Ice Fields. The Golden Compass's finale is a breathtaking let-down, even after the preceding levels have systematically lowered your expectations.

After about 30 seconds of completely trivial gameplay, you run into a man in a suit and the game abruptly ends with the placard announcement: "Lyra and Pan (Lyra's pet weasel) continue north where their destiny awaits them beyond the aurora." The intention of this odd send off is no doubt to pave the way for a sequel, but the impression it gives is of a game so demoralised by its own inadequacy that it sends you away and carries on alone.

There's evidence that this is aimed at children, and not just in the subject matter. Between each level is a riddle, a typical example of which is "On four legs, the desert they wander/With large humps, no water they squander." (The answer, as we're clearly in a revelatory mood, is camel.)

However, this is a game, not a general knowledge test, and anybody who's spent any time with children – or indeed played games as one – knows that their standards are just as high as ours. Kids deserve better than this. We all do.

The Golden Compass

With poor collision detection, nonsensical interactions, and a miserly playing time, The Golden Compass starts off badly and gets steadily worse. It's aimed at children in the same spirit that rotten eggs sometimes are
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Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.