Hannah Montana: The Movie Reviews

I’m going to be honest with you all; I’ve never seen the Hannah Montana movie and I’ve never seen a single episode of the TV show. I didn’t even know the premise of the show until I had a friend who did watch it explain it to me. When I first realized that I’d be reviewing this game, one thought crossed my mind, “Oh, no.” Then I tried to build up my confidence...Afterall, I survived the fifty-two stages of heck known as Action 52, so how bad could this game really be? So, after playing it way more than I wanted to, is this as terrible as I had imagined or was it surprisingly decent...or even good? Well, read on and find out.

The gameplay of Hannah Montana: The Movie is split into two parts. The first part, the part that you’re forced into a tutorial for, is performing musical stuff on stage. This part is actually kind of fun. It’s essentially a series of minigames involving playing to the crowd, singing, dancing, and playing instruments. It’s a neat little concept and it’s done fairly well, aside from some shoddy motion controls. If you’re not a fan of the music, though, you may want to hit the mute button during these sequences; you’ll still be able to do the mini games, you just won’t have to deal with the tunes. If you’re a fan of this kind of music, though, you’ll likely really enjoy these parts of the game.

There is one really big flaw regarding these parts of the game, though: The difficulty. It’s impossible to lose. When I say impossible, I mean IMPOSSIBLE. You can go out of your way to make sure that your score is zero and they’ll still push you forward. The game won’t tell you to do it again until you’ve made the crowd happy. In fact, the crowd never boos you...EVER. The game never tells you that you’ve done poorly...EVER. While the concert areas of the game can be fun, a lot of the enjoyment is ripped out when you realize that no matter what you do, you’re going to succeed...Unless your goal is to fail...In which case you’ll fail at failing. Ironic, isn’t it?

If the whole game was those concert scenes, with a little difficulty and an ability to fail added in, I’d probably give this game a somewhat decent score...However, second type of gameplay pretty much ruins the game as a whole. The rest of the game, or should I say the majority of the game, consists of awful third-person “do-this-and-that” garbage with a horrible “save our country livin’ from the evil mall that they want to build” storyline. In this part of the game, you’ll sometimes have a compass telling you where you need to go and everything...It’s awful. It makes this part of the game so incredibly easy that it’s boring and repetitive. There’s even a part in the game where you’re ‘timed’ to find some equipment, but it’s no challenge since if you follow the compass, you’ll easily grab it all in time. Not that the tasks you’re asked to do are challenging, but the little challenge that’s there is sucked away by the compass, which makes things so very, very boring.

Also, another very poor aspect of the game is the ability to get yourself stuck. I mean that in two ways, actually. First, everything in the game seems to be like velcro. If you bump into a person or an object there’s a decent chance that you’ll become stuck to that person or object for a second or two before you’re able to wiggle free. It’s not fun trying to walk past random people knowing that if they’re too close, you’ll become glued to one another. The other version of ‘stuck’ that I spoke about is the actual game itself. The game encourages you to buy stuff, so whenever the player gets money, the game pretty much expects you to go out and buy new outfits and the like...Well, I never did that. Then I saw that a trophy was awarded for buying 100 articles of clothing and I had enough money to do that, so I went crazy and pretty much bought every article of clothing there was. Then, later in the game, you need to go to a specific store and buy a dress...Well, I had already cleaned that store out of all its merchandise. It didn’t matter. The game refused to progress until I bought said dress from said store...Even if the store lacked anything to buy because I had bought the article of clothing before I was supposed to. In a game where buying items is very much encouraged, why in the world would the programmers make it so something like this could happen?

In the third-person area there’s also a bunch of minigames to be found...But none of them are particularly enjoyable. The horse-riding one in particular can just plain be frustrating since the six-axis motion controls don’t always seem to work. In fact, most mini games use motion controls, which can make most of them pretty frustrating. Also, like I stated in the paragraph above, you’re also encouraged to play dress-up and buy dresses and shoes and jewelry and various other forms of clothing....You know, the stereotypical girl-type stuff. The game can get so girly at times, I actually had to pause the game so I could go outside, grab an axe, and start chopping firewood to make myself feel more manly again. This girliness can be good or bad depending on who’s playing the game. A little girl will probably love it...A guy in his mid-twenties, not so much.

The graphics of Hannah Montana: The Movie are done well...For a Playstation 2 game. They’re not terrible graphics by any means, but they do look a generation behind. The environments also seem to lack any sort of personality to them...Most locations, while detailed, just look bland. The audio of the game is done very well though...Most of the voice-acting is pretty well done and the musical bits are in good quality...Which can be either a good thing or a bad thing depending on your taste in music.

Even with its enjoyable concert levels, when it’s all said and done, this game is a flop. Some people may argue that I’m being harsh because it was made for kids. I disagree. Even if a child is playing this, there’s no reason for them to have to deal with the bad controls and poor gameplay of the third-person areas. Anyone who plays this game will likely be pleasantly surprised at first with the concert stages, but once you get hurled into that third-person part of the game, you’ll likely find it not worth your while to make your way through it to get to the next concert area. Even then, the fact that you don’t even need to touch the controller to successfully complete the concerts really takes away any reason to play those levels, too. There’s way too much of the bad and way too little of the good. This game actually had promise...Unfortunately, sometimes promises are broken.