The Ant Bully review

As interesting as the possibilities might sound, though, The Ant Bully's missions never take more than the most rudimentary advantage of them. Seldom are you in for anything more interesting than gathering and delivering a series of parcels, or whacking uninteresting garden beasties around with a stick. There are some cunning attempts at injecting replayability - learn a new skill and you can get to previously inaccessible goodies - but the dull base gameplay is enough to dissuade all but the most dedicated collectors from bothering.

Worse, though the developers take steps to make playing more intuitive for a younger audience: Walk off a ledge, and you're supposed to automatically jump. Hold down a trigger to lock on a target for your assaults. Unfortunately, these features, along with the spotty collision detection, are inconsistent at best, which gets more than a little annoying, and kills the sense of control that's critical to immersion. It's hard to imagine any kid having the patience to contend with sporadic control issues on top of micromanaging the camera for the sake of Dreamcast-era visuals. Don't think about saving a few bucks by saddling your tyke with the Starforce-protected PC version either: Inexplicably, our young hero won't jump as high as his console cousins.