Willy Wonka and the tsokolate Factory was one of my paborito films as a kid. A classic film starring Gene Wilder filled with adventure and whimsy… We’re not talking about that one. The Tim burton remake, Charlie and the tsokolate Factory, which felt madami drab but at least the visuals were nice… also not what we’re talking about, technically. The video game, Charlie and the tsokolate Factory for PS2, published sa pamamagitan ng Warner Bros. Interactive, who now own the Mortal Kombat license. Weird, mentioning Mortal Kombat in each artikulo thus far. The game was developed sa pamamagitan ng High Voltage Software, who are still around today and worked on a portion of the Saints Row series, the modern Mortal Kombat games, and Zombieland: Double Tap as of recently. Charlie and the tsokolate Factory advertises itself as being able to explore the factory at your own leisure, so enjoying the factory myself as a kid, maybe it will be fun…. Yeah, I wish.



The pamagat screen looks promising, has a nice whimsical tone to it and the factory looks nice, but sadly, this is where the pleasantries come to a halt. Be it my scratched disc or be it a part of all copies of the game, the game just dumps you into the world with no opening story or nothing. I assumed that it was my disc just skipping it, but after the first level, you get a cutscene that shows Chapter 1 and then it goes to Chapter 2 in the susunod cutscene, so I don’t know. The camera controls are hard inverted and go at an alarmingly fast rate, and they just make me feel ill. Speaking of ill, Charlie looks a little… malnourished. I know he’s poor and stuff, but he legit looks like he crawled out of Hiroshima after the bombs dropped. The game puts you into a long line and makes you walk down it trying to collect a single dollar, doing all sorts of wonky platforming on boxes and taking notice of collision glitches like giant snowballs clipping into the boxes. This is then followed up sa pamamagitan ng a reasonably enjoyable section where you control Charlie as he slides down the road on a trash can lid, avoiding trucks and garbage cans. It’s short, basic, but enjoyable for what it is. But trust me, once you get to the factory, it’s all over. This is where the game shows just how boring it truly is.
The cutscenes have these characters looking really… deformed. Charlie looks fine, even if he has the black soulless eyes of a demon, but everyone else is so oddly detailed and they look kinda gross. Agustus looks like a whitewashed Fat Albert, Veruca’s big eyes piss me off, and you got Mike Teavee out here looking like fucking Johnny Test. But the most disgusting thing here are the Oompa-Loompas. They did this actor dirty. Their introduction is honestly horrifying. They run around at high speed all around Charlie with this distorted sound. It’s like something out of Predator. Once the game starts, you are tasked with collecting Oompa-Loompas to do tasks for you while you lead them. Think Pikmin but far madami tedious. The Oompa-Loompas always take their sweet time to do the task you order the too and sometimes just run around for minutos before finally finishing the task. And just you wait until you gotta make them collect fast running creatures that don’t make any sense existing in the factory, because that’s a real mess. You can stun the creatures sa pamamagitan ng hitting them with Gobstoppers, yes, the kendi you eat, but the lock on is so wonky that it will go all over the place before finally landing on the creature, and even then, it’s not a guarantee you’ll hit them. I didn’t realize I had to hit these things several times before I could advance to the susunod level. I walked around the first area of the factory for thirty minutos and ended up collecting all the collectables sa pamamagitan ng accident before I realized what to do. But the segundo level is where I just gave up on this game. You gotta get Agustus out of the tsokolate pipe, which looks madami like he’s being grinded to a literal gooey mush with the bad animations and colors. To save him, you gotta close three vents, to do that, you gotta trap robots using halaya beans (Please don’t ask). But the ball will never always hit the vents and you have to roll it at the vents because the vents are surrounded sa pamamagitan ng sharp thorns. If you walk into them, you get hurt and knocked back out. But if the ball is already too far into the vines, you either gotta wait for the robot to leave the ball or just kill yourself and reset the room. And Once you finally close the vents, you get to do it several madami times. At that point, I had enough of this tedious mess and just quit.
I can only imagine how many children who enjoyed Charlie and the tsokolate Factory got this game only to get what feels like madami of a chore than a game. I will give credit, the music is really well orchestrated and the idea of exploring the factory is a decent idea. I always loved exploring the worlds of characters from TV shows and movies, like the town of Halloween Town in the Nightmare Before pasko game or Bikini Bottom in any of the Spongebob games. Too bad the damo hurts my eyes in the factory. Those compliments don’t outway the mountain of tedium. So no matter what, the game is still a boring mess and you still spent money on this trash and despite giving the company your money for it, you get nothing! You lose! Good day, sir!