In Disney's DS adventure, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, those lovely Pevensie children return to C.S. Lewis' wonderland and find it in disarray. Thirteen hundred years after they first visited the land, the evil King Miraz has set up court and denied the rightful heir, Prince Caspian, his birthright. Thus begins a quest to topple the nefarious monarch, full of talking animals and battles. However, while Disney released a decent product, it's not entertaining enough to deserve a purchase, especially when compared to the system's premier offerings.

Prince Caspian's divided into two segments, adventuring and battling. The former has you wandering around Narnia collecting various items for your party and visiting locales. Here, you'll run across non-player characters that'll further the story and enemies, most of which you can avoid fighting if you wander far enough away. This portion of the game serves its function, but the graphics look like they were yanked from the outdated Game Boy Advance, which doesn't make us happy, especially after playing the visually pleasing The World Ends with You and The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass.

As for battling, you're thrust into combat whenever you stray too close to an enemy. After a brief fade to black, you wind up in a 3-D environment with your opponents on the left and you and your comrades on the right. From there, you tap the character you'd like to attack with and then select an enemy. This causes one of six Battle Moves to appear, mini games where you must complete a task in order to damage your adversary. To deliver a couple sword slashes, for example, you trace yellow lines across the screen, and to summon magic, you must connect glowing orbs in a certain order. Doing this successfully causes your chosen hero to attack, thus hurting your enemies. Afterwards, you repeat this process until someone wins. In addition, you can access your Item Bag to feed your party (restores their health) and create new equipment by bringing found items to the Forge, which becomes unlocked after you locate the seven brothers.

Initially, Battle Moves make combat a somewhat entertaining affair. Problem is, there are only six. After a short while, we grew bored of tracing lines, firing arrows and connecting dots. Things grew complex the more we played, but not enough to keep us interested. Wander too close to enemy. Engage enemy. Watch the same combat animations. It gets old.

Furthermore, the 3-D segments aren't impressive, resembling first generation DS graphics. With four party members standing within the same vicinity, their lack of detail sometimes makes it difficult figuring out who's who. This results in selecting the wrong person for an attack.

Audio consists of the usual epic adventure music and standard issue sword clangs. We never encountered any voice work, and after a while, played with the sound off or without headphones.

On the positive side, Disney avoided releasing yet another crappy movie-based game, and for that it deserves applause, but that doesn't mean Prince Caspian is a wardrobe full of fun either. Its bland combat and ancient looking graphics keep it from claiming the throne.

Related Links

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian DS Game Guide