I own the Napoleon Dynamite DVD and am a fan of the movie, though I’m not an uber geek fan; basically, I’m one of those fans who know the story and love to quote the most famous lines. When fans heard there was a Napoleon Dynamite game in the works, many wondered exactly one thing…just how bad would it be. Honestly, how do you make a game based on Napoleon Dynamite? Well, the game is out, and we’ve got our hands on it. So is Napoleon Dynamite as bad as many thought it would be?

THE STORY SO FAR
You play mostly as Napoleon, though you won’t play as him every game…just almost all of them. The game seems like a re-telling of the movie at the very beginning, but soon it becomes apparent (if you’ve seen the movie) that this is a very original story, and perhaps one that didn’t need to be told in the first place. You play as Napoleon during a normal day in his life, which has him practicing his sweet dance moves, letting the family llama escape by accident, him trying to go find the llama, and then entering a talent contest to win the money to buy a suit to attend a party Pedro is involved in. Along the way you’ll partake in a wide variety of activities, and you’ll even get to see the Loch Ness monster and fly a unicorn. Why? I don’t know, why don’t you just get off my back…GOSH!

I’m really sorry about that, but I needed to get a quote out of the way somewhere in this review, and that seemed like a good a place as any. Okie doke, time to move on.

SINGLE-PLAYER: GAMEPLAY
The majority of the game is based on the single-player story of Napoleon’s wild day, and you’ll be able to beat this adventure in only a handful of hours, almost around the three hour mark if I’m being kind. Seriously, the game is short, way short, but at least you won’t be moaning as badly when you’re wanting those spent hours of your life back.

Napoleon Dynamite plays like Wario Ware games, meaning they are very simple and are usually quickly played and done away with, meaning that Napoleon Dynamite is a gathering of about 28 minigames that usually consist of three rounds at best and are then done away with and forgotten, only for you to revisit them should you feel the need to get the absolute best score possible and gold on everything.

The minigame that shows up the most is a dancing minigame (surprise surprise) that has you practicing your sweet dance moves as you button press to the notes as they appear on the screen. Besides dancing you’ll try to throw a football as far as you can go (I’ve seen this exact same game done better on the Internet for free); compete in a Street Fighter-esque fighting games; fight ninjas in a side-scrolling adventure along the Double Dragon days; play a game of tetherball where you won’t hit the ball most of the time because the game’s timing mechanics are way off; shoot a bow at targets (relatively fun); hunt wolverines (not nearly as fun as you’d think); do some sweet jumps on a BMX bike; playing a game of Simon Says; go bowling with bumpers; ride a horse; play Dodgeball (kind of fun, but does have a system shutting off glitch – happened to me three times in a row); a water balloon fort destroying fight; jump on a trampoline and do tricks; feed Tina the llama; drag a toy from behind your school bus and try to destroy it; shoot something from a low rider (honestly, looks like wads of wet toilet paper); save Nessie from explorers; compete in a Lifeforce like side-scrolling shooter on Pegasus; make a cake (Cooking Mama need not watch out); build a time machine; collect eggs; and even some others too.

None of the games take very long to complete when you can do them right, but too many of them are needlessly hard (die Nessie die you stupid monster), having broken gameplay mechanics (the timing needed for hitting a tetherball or a pinata are way off), or will even cause system crashes (dodgeball is the sole culprit we found). Besides just beating the levels once you’ll also unlock the ability to try Survival modes for some levels, which get even harder and harder as you go along.

Honestly, the only reason we forced ourselves to play the game through completion was so we could review the game, and because in some manical part in our mind we wanted to see exactly just how bad the game could get before it was eventually over. As it turns out, Napoleon Dynamite was bad…really bad. The movie the game is based on is a very love it or hate it movie, but when it comes to the game, there will be nothing but hate.

MULTIPLAYER: GAMEPLAY
The multiplayer games are the same ones you’ll have already played during the single-player adventure, but now you’ll even get less of them, such as going from over twenty to below ten. Ouch indeed. For that matter, beyond the football toss game, none of the other ones are even very fun, especially considering you’re playing these multiplayer style. Why was dodgeball not even made one of the multiplayer games you could play?

GRAPHICS
Napoleon Dynamite isn’t ugly, but instead is downright fugly; yes, that’s right, fugly! The game tries hard to blend photographed character heads with cardboard cutout like environments mixed with static images, which in the end comes off looking like a badly done South Park episode. Half the time you won’t even know what you’re looking at, because the level of detail is so poor, wolverines look like nothing more than colored blobs ambling towards you.

AUDIO
The music Napoleon dances to isn’t very sweet at all, there aren’t very many sound bytes at all, and the effects sound bland and very generic.

IN CONCLUSION
Ugh, just ugh! I can’t think of a single reason to recommend this game to anyone, because I don’t even think hardcore Napoleon Dynamite fans would find themselves having a good time. I can only sit here, tell you not to buy this game, and hope eventually all the un-sold copies are gathered together and buried in the desert somewhere next to where all those Atari ET copies are supposedly.

Rating:
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