Another year, another animated film based on another licensed video game. Midway's Happy Feet focuses on Mumbles, a penguin born into a clan where the power of song speaks volumes. Mumbles, however, can't sing worth a duck waddle, so he resorts to using his dancing feet to win the respect of his parents and peers. This all sounds like an ideal game for the Nintendo Wii, especially with the dancing potential. However, Midway fails, due to the game's lack of variety.

The developers broke the game up into three different types of stages -- swimming, dancing and belly-sliding. Belly-sliding sticks out as the best of the three, as players control Mumbles as he slides down icy hills. He jumps over objects using the 2 button, while players move him left and right by tilting the Wii remote. Swimming works about the same way, with gamers able to move him left and right in the water while collecting items and reaching checkpoints. Both of these types of racing stages may entertain younger audiences, despite their short length.

As for its dancing levels, each stage plays in a similar fashion to Dance Dance Revolution, using scrolling arrows moving up the screen. Players perform movements with the Wii remote in the direction of the arrows to successfully complete each stage, all the while grooving to licensed songs by Deee-Lite, K.C. and the Sunshine Band and others. Strangely, the game doesn't contain many songs from the film, a questionable decision.

Sadly, these easy dancing stages fail to provide a challenge. Players never have to perform complex two-steps. The game attempts to compete with Dance Dance Revolution, but it lacks the excitement of Konami's popular dancing series.

Those expecting sharp CG movies from the film will be disappointed. Despite the fact that some of the penguin models look good up close, Happy Feet's uninspired design fails to capture any emotion of the film. The boring level design contains limited scenery only made worse by snow and more snow. Furthermore, the animation looks broken half the time. The lip-synching sucks as well. On the other hand, the rest of the audio sounds better, with decent effects with a fine cast taking over for the actors from the movie.