Hue Pixel Painter/Tony Hawk's Motion review

Man alive, this is all a bit sketchy. While we’re happy that someone has seen fit to reprise tilt control technology for a handheld game, they could have had the decency to build a game around it that took longer than a lunch break to finish. The Hawk part of this package is thinner than a roll of griptape when it comes to content, and the ‘bonus game’, Hue Pixel Painter, is just silly. And what’s a coloring-in game doing coming bundled with a skating game anyway?

Actually, Motion is a skating and snowboarding game. There are two – two! - whole levels for each sport and around half a dozen game modes. This sounds reasonable, but away from the traditional high-score challenge, each mode will keep you busy for no more than minutes. And they’re all rubbish. Roll around a level collecting green pellets, anyone? See how much air you can get on a vert ramp? See how far you can balance on a grind rail? Yawn. They’re not even linked together into some overriding story mode like in the other Hawk games.

The tilt controls are used to turn your board left and right. They don’t work too badly, and you can adjust the sensitivity, but it all feels a bit superfluous and gimmicky rather than an integral part of the game. And with the shoulder buttons used to accelerate and jump, and trickery performed with the face buttons and then some special moves mapped to the touch screen, everything’s cluttered. The game also looks dreadful.

Pixel Painter is a puzzle game where you guide a little chap through piles of paint, linking the piles to bring a drab world back to life. De Blob it is not. Tilting the DS steers your character around the screen, and it makes you look like you’re a maniac who’s slopping pancake mix around a frying pan.

Dec 17, 2008