Back in 2005 I had a chipped Xbox. One of the games I burned onto a disc was the, then, newly released Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. I played it for fifteen minutes or so, wrote it off as yet another sub-par license game and went on with my life. A few weeks ago I had somewhat of a Charlie And The Chocolate Factory bonanza, where I re-watched all the three movies and started wondering if there was any games made related to the Wonka universe. Then I remembered this game and quickly bought a used copy for my PS2. It was time to re-evaluate it, 21 years later!The intro was pretty good, it definitely had that specific Wonka charm that we all know and love. But right off the bat I noticed the main narrator sounded sort of... off? I couldn't quite put my finger on why he was so hard to understand. The sound of his voice was just right, but sometimes full sentences went by without a single understandable word. I'm fairly certain he has some sort of speech impediment or otherwise having trouble pronouncing certain sounds in a row without making a mess of all the letters. It didn't improve over time either, most of his lines were impossible to understand through the entire game. But all the other voice actors talked properly and I suspect some of them were even the real actors from the movie, so you know. You win some, you lose some. All in all, despite the narrator being awful, the game did a very good job selling the illusion of a well put together and magical product. So the setting was more or less nailed, cool!
All the stages had charm, a distinct identity and - while very simply laid out - felt somewhat inspired. As a matter of fact I was pleasantly surprised as to how "okay" everything was, from stage layout to controls and missions. I thought to myself that this might be on par with Oogie's Revenge, if the slight jank (which had already presented itself in form of some weird hitboxes and awkward movements that didn't quite connect the way they were supposed to) didn't take over going forward.
"the jank did continue to be a nuisance"
Sadly though, a lot of the jank did continue to be a nuisance. The objectives were communicated through speech, not always accompanied by a text prompt. Fair enough. But the voices were sometimes lower in volume than the background music and various sound effects, so I now and then ended up not really knowing what I was supposed to do, because I simply couldn't hear it. And there's no way to have the objective repeat, and if it was accompanied by a text prompt, that too was nowhere to be found once it had disappeared from the screen. Thankfully I could change the volume on all things, SFX, background music, voices and so on, in the settings. The only caveat was that the cutscenes didn't allow for that (you know, where most of the talking happens...).
I used the hint system extensively. Presumably put in place to help younger players, pressing R2 makes grandpa Joe nudge the player in the right direction. And boy did I require nudging. I must have heard Joe's voice more than any other throughout the adventure. The hint system did not, however, give any clues as to where to find all the collectables that were spread out on each level. And even though this is a kids game, it was pretty tricky finding everything. At least before unlocking a certain ability, that instead made it trivial. I failed to complete the gathering objectives on the first couple of stages - which in turn made the game a bit harder since all the buffs and increased health etc were tied to completing those. That's a bit weird, don't you think? If the player does badly for some reason, going forward will be harder. Oh well. I managed to 100% many of the later stages so it evened out. And in all fairness I didn't really need the buffs anyway - the game was very easy once I understood what to do.
"the game was very easy once I understood what to do"
After micromanaging the Oompa-Loompa's (which was painful at times because PS2 pathfinding was never all that great) to help all the children in the same order as the movie for a few hours I got a short cutscene - that skipped most of the movie's ending and just called it a day after being shot out of the factory with the glass elevator. Oh, that's right, the elevator. After completing the game I got the chance to go back to certain stages and collect a few new things to unlock tidbits from the movie all gathered under a new menu item called "Bonus", but I didn't feel like spending more time with this game than I already had. It was admittedly much better than I'd thought, but it's still a movie license game with lots of jank. I'd recommend it to fans of Wonka in a heart beat, but not to people in general.
