Attack of the Movies 3D pits your Wii remote as a shooter against six B movie scenarios with the stereotypical monsters and other enemies to fight with or without those silly 3D colored glasses.
Ratings:
Graphics & Audio: 15/25,
Gameplay: 8/25,
Creativity 13/25,
Fun 13/25
Total: 49/100
When you open the package of Attack of the Movies 3D toss those glasses back in and never do the 3D stuff, you do get the option. The 3D using those red and blue glasses is just as cheap as it used to be when I was a kid looking at 3D pictures in books or magazines with them.
Once you start the Majesco game developed by Panic Button you have one movie or level unlocked and you unlock the other five by beating each level. Each movie has a couple of checkpoints and getting to them is a relief as the game starts off very hard but not in a good way.
Attack of the Movies 3D is a simple arcade shooter with power ups in the form of health, better weapons and more ammo but the power ups are just not that easy to get all the time. You simply shoot the bad things like skeletons, robots and attacking sea creatures as well as trying to hit those power ups to make it to the boss fight.
A couple of the movies have a partial boss fight in the middle but mostly you get through all the smaller henchmen type enemies to get to the final boss fight of some huge creature. They have a couple of the movies, the space one and the robot level where the boss fights are against either the core of some power source or a flying ship.
The other four movies have you fight a creature like a giant scorpion or a crypt monster which is some tentacled one eyed underground dwelling beast. Just big easy to hit creatures that you have to put enough lead or laser blaster fire into them that they would fall over from the weight or too many holes.
Attack of the Movies is really a low budget game and the Wii edition works but not well enough to get very excited about it with controls that handle fine. The game does not have much in the way of variety other than the six different movie scenarios and a few different types of attacks.
Insects or bats fly at you and try to sting you, ants try to bite you and other ground dwelling insects or even tanks shoot stuff at you for basic attacks. Skeletons will throw flaming heads at you or hit you and the space movie has mostly laser shots with your pistol, Uzi and AK-47 weapons suddenly turning into laser weapons.
The games graphics are decent but not all that impressive and the 3D game selection is just as bad as you could imagine a 3D game with those silly anaglyph glasses could be. It does have a 3 dimensional aspect to it but the glasses are annoyingly cheap and if you wear glasses to see they don’t fit at all.
If you try to play the game in 3D for long you will get eye strain so you should just worry about hitting all those various flying and skittering things in 2D. Attack of the Movies 3D does give you the option of 3D or 2D before starting a game so click on the 2D option after you check out the 3D for curiosity sake.
Graphics are pretty basic as well but it would have been alright if the game had not been so darn hard or short, it took me and my two sons to complete the game. Just two of us could not hit enough bad things so all three of use worked at the game for about an hour and finished it up, all six movies in one sitting.
Attack of the Movies 3D would make a decent party game but for single player the game just does not have enough bullets going toward the bad stuff to keep them off you and lowering your health. There are a decent amount of power ups but creatures often just pop up in the air and in less than a second fill 1/4 of the screen then hit you.
They give you no chance to hit the thing from a distance to keep them at bay and all the movies have this type of attack a few times for waves of each movie. The game gets unbelievably tough at spots and other times it is ridiculously easy so things are not well balanced.
The games audio is the only thing that worked well and you really do not have much of a chance to notice it most of the time but while my sons were playing you could hear clearly the various sound effects and even reminders to reload. On the Wii the controller is shaken to reload your current gun which happens often for the pistol as it only holds 20 rounds.
Other weapons thankfully hold much more ammo and when playing with several people it is hard to tell which player needs a reload, you just don’t have time to look. The game does tell you when you need to reload as well as your gun making a click instead of firing helps but often you are not sure who needs to reload.
Attack of the Movies 3D is over way too quick, by the time you get used to the gameplay mechanics and the fast paced action your done. Attack does have the six movie levels and an additional unlock, code available online with a simple search, for a better two barreled gun but that is about all the fun you’ll have.
The game is just too tough at times instead of ramping up the difficulty gradually and is short so there is not much value but it does make a good party game and four people would be the right number. The difficulty would make a four player game much better as you could designate one person to hunt for unlocks while the others cover their section or some such to deal with everything.
Attack of the Movies 3D is a clever but unpolished game and should have been in development a little longer, as it stands there is something here for a quick arcade shooter. Attack of the Movies 3D would make a decent party game rental for a fun shooter on the Wii but I’m not sure if a purchase would be worthwhile.
