Chicken Little: Ace in Action review

The controls are where Little first starts to peck at us. While you use the d-pad to move in every direction, the face buttons correspond to the direction you shoot. Hit X and shoot upwards, A to shoot right and so on. This makes for some frantic action but gets frustrating when you need to shoot something diagonally, in which case you hit two buttons to do so. This turns into a mess as you need to get directly in the path of your target while being hit from all sides. Why no lock-on?

Action was nice enough to give you a radar for the bottom screen, but it's useless 'cause enemies will spawn right in front of you, behind you and sometimes right on top of you, getting in cheap hits and threatening to undo your anger management therapy.

And how come fighting aliens and robots in space is boring? When you have to run down the same damn paths over and over, it's a breath of fresh air to see beautiful graphical touches like flowing magma. These parts are few and far between and like the film, the game becomes a test of patience and willpower to endure it all.