The world is just a sad meat ball
Garfield: Lasagna World Tour was such an unloved project that it’s developers, EKO Software, printed it on to compact discs. Not the standard DVD format most Playstation 2 games were formatted to. Especially telling, given that GLWT was a late release for the PS2 (2007).
But that’s really the least of EKO and publisher Conspiracy Games troubles on this impossibly sad disc. The most apparent fuck up you notice immediately out of the gate is that whoever did the voice acting for our beloved sarcastic, feline should never ever act again. Ever.
In fact, the performance is so dreadful they should have been thrown in thespian jail and flogged by a tandem of Morgan Freeman and Patrick Stewart.
To be fair, when I picked the title up there was never a thought to myself like, “Wow, now this is going to be be a good time.” but for some reason after all of this time and so many bad budget titles I did think so myself, “It’s Garfield. How bad could it really be?”
As usual I was wrong.
Apart from the uninspired voice acting talent, the games plot is painfully empty. It’s as if a week into programming the entire office working on the game threw out all of their keyboards. They might not have had any keyboards to begin with. All I know, despite the voice acting and the fact that that when you do actually concede and allow yourself to listen to this cat drone on to have a better clue at what you’re doing the sound clips out and skips almost the entire plot. Which I believe has something to do with a newscast that states if you can find the clues all around the world you will receive a key to the lasagna factory.
To be honest, I literally beat the game less than an hour ago and I still don’t really have much of an idea as to what the hell happened.
I do know that if your game title has the words, world and tour in it that it should probably highlight more than three different countries.
The hunt for the key to the lasagna factory begins in Garfield’s neighborhood, moves on to Egypt, Mexico and Italy (which the key is NOT in, ironically). The levels are hardly distinguishable, aside from Egypt has some sand, Mexico has some snake enemies that wear sombreros and Italy has some boats in canals. That’s about it.
There are few bright spots, where the game actually does work as it is intended and occasionally you even forget what you are playing and enjoy it as a simple platformer but those blissful moments are few and far between. It’s almost as if the programmers forgot they were trying to torture the human race.
Ultimately, the game runs about three hours total but between the cruel level design, shabby camera, lack of save spots and fact that you can find yourself twenty five minutes of progress away from a save point and completely without the access or ability to move past certain obstacles the game will painstakingly take longer.
I can’t believe Jim Davis (creator of Garfield) hasn’t John Wick-Ed everyone involved with this game. It’s truly that awful. It made me like Garfield less. How do you ruin Garfield? It’s so easy. Pizza, hot dogs, lasagna. A cat that bullies a dog. It might not always be a home run but it’s a triple at least. Shame on EKO Software.
Overall: 49%
