Review: CID The Dummy

This is a side scrolling, pseudo-3D platformer. You play CID, pronounced Sid, who is an advanced crash test dummy with ideas above his station. His boss, Professor B.M. Werken (laugh? I never considered it) snatches CID from obscurity to send him off to rescue his daughter MIA (…urgl…) from the nasty half-man, half-crash dummy villain called D-TROIT (…sigh…) and his army of evil dummies. If you think the plot is hackneyed rubbish, wait until you try to play the game. Actually, don’t. Don’t play the game. Don’t even consider it.

Don’t Be A Dummy

CID has a number of moves at his disposal, but they all come down to randomly flapping the Wii-mote around. Trying to do one thing usually ends up with you accidentally doing something else. It’s not the fault of the Wii, as other games manage to map their controls very well indeed. CID just seems to infect the Wii with rubbishness.

Example? To draw the bazooka CID has on his back, you are supposed to mimic the action CID does – i.e. reach up and back for your weapon while holding down the A button. For the most part, all that happens is you end up punching air, stepping forward all the time you do. Normally you step off the edge of something, or into the field of vision of the baddie you were going to shoot. Cue a less than amusing chase as you run around, trying to draw your weapon, while being pursued by deadly bad guys.

Ancient Artefacts

CID The Dummy is a 2D platformer with enough 3D aspirations to make jumping anywhere with any accuracy next to impossible. The blocky, ugly textures don’t help. You can control a fall to a degree, but not the upward section of a bounce-pad jump. Except when you can.

Levels are empty, uninteresting collections of switch puzzles, toxic pits, whirling blades and leaps of faith, along with every other platforming cliché you never wanted to see again. There is likely an ice world in there somewhere, but the game is so bad that it just crushed my desire to continue, with its horrible post-death restarts and bizarre restart pad placement – sometimes every four feet or so, sometimes rarer than a fun moment in this game.

My Eyes! My Ears! They’re Bleeding!

I mentioned blocky textures. Those are the good bits of the graphics. The whole thing has been built from flat rectangular blocks, each bigger than the badly animated, uninspiring CID himself.

The cutscenes are laughably bad. The floppy, tube like limbs of the characters; the soggy pacing; the poor camera angles; the pathetic attempts at visual slapstick. In all respects, they mirror the rest of the game. VO work has been supplied by Am-Dram-R-Us, and is inconsistent at best. Character accents are all over the place, as are the recording levels. One level in, and it’s pretty clear that everyone involved in the VO stuff has lost faith in the project and would just like to go home.

Enough

Right, no more. There is nothing good to say about this game. I imagine it was pretty poor on the PSP, and it’s even worse with shoddy Wii controls added.

Unfortunately, CID developer Twelve now has the Tarzan license and is also doing a game all about capoeira. I like both, and my soul has died a little on obtaining that knowledge.