Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge

Written by Shawn Kendrick on 11/21/2005 for PS2  

For all of us Tim Burton fans, Buena Vista games has offered us a title that takes off where the 1993 cult classic movie, The Nightmare Before Christmas, left off. This offering, so ingenuously entitled The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie’s Revenge, starts simply enough with Lock, Shock, and Barrel bringing Jack Skellington’s nemesis Oogie Boogie back to life. Naturally, Oogie being evil and all, wants revenge. This all takes place one year after the story of the movie ends. You’re job as Jack Skellington, aka the Pumpkin King, is to stop Oogie from completing his vengeful plan of overtaking Halloween town and ultimately control of control of all of the holidays.

Prior to rejoining in the fight to stop Oogie, Jack has obtained a new tool from Halloween town’s resident mad scientist, Dr. Finklestein. This tool developed by the good Dr., who is quite obviously not an M.D., is called the Soul Robber. This tool is definitely you best friend in this game. You can use it like a whip or you can grab on to ghouls and toss them around, for a bit. You can also use it to swing around a little bit. Naturally, you can use it to suck souls out of ghouls, here and there, hence the name Soul Robber.

The visuals in this game are true to the original movie. The characters of this game are very well done and are just that, characters. They are very detailed and at many times brought a chuckle, or oftentimes, a devilish grin to my face. One of the joys of this game is the fact that it has a mischievous side to it that is displayed in some of the characters. 
The landscape of the town is also nice and detailed and appropriately sets the scene for the ghoulish action that takes place.

Auditorilly speaking, this game is top notch. Being a music lover and musician, I’m sometimes hard to please in this category. With that said Nightmare, excells in this area. The songs are all either originals for this game or from the movie and they’re all excellent. Again, that is coming from a gamer who heavily prefers games that are backed by actual rock bands, ala the Tony Hawk franchise.

The sound aspect of the game is even further strengthened by the excellent voice over work in this movie. Even the lame moments are delightfully lame. In this same vein, it’s evident that at times BVG is going for the cheeky effect in its dialogue. This adds tremendously to the enjoyment of the game, at least for those of us who appreciate such humor.

Despite providing an excellent environment for a game to take place, Nightmare falls very flat when it comes to the actual game play. Although, Jack’s movements are very true to the original film, his functionality is second rate. Take for example the heavy reliance on the sole robber function. Although it sounds really cool, this weapon is simply a whip for most part. Sure you can also use it to grab enemies and suck their soles, as well as a few other tricks but throughout the majority of the game, the sole robber is just a whip.  There are some combos to perform but they are not very creative at all. Which is too bad considering this game has the signature of one of the most creative moviemakers in recent memory.
The biggest knock on the lack of creativity in this game is its repetitive nature. In general, it gets plain boring slapping people around with your sole robber. The exception is when you upgrade to the Pumpkin King or Santa Jack. Once you upgrade to these you can spit a little fire and throw some Christmas presents. Now if you could only set the presents on fire and then throw them, that would be cool! My wishes aside, when you are in the other Jack modes, the character is much more fun to play, but not fun enough to make up for the drudgery of being plain old Jack Skellington

In terms of Oogie Boogie and his minions, the game also is very weak in creating an interesting nemesis. Consistent with the rest of the game, the characters are fairly well developed in terms of style, however they are really easy to beat. I do enjoy the rhythm-based battles that take place with the bosses on each level. Once again this is unfortunately overdone, and what once was a good idea gets old, real quick.

My biggest critique on the game play is the fixed camera view. If this game were created anywhere near the time the movie was released then I would understand, however that was 12 years ago. In this day and age, a moveable camera angle is just plain expected, particularly in an adventure game. It just mystifies me as to why a game spawned from such a visually and stylistic creation would not allow the player to “take in” the landscape freely.

In conclusion, this game is long on style and short on substance. Those of us who are Tim Burton fans should consider adding this to our collections, simply for sentimental reasons and to enjoy the animation. For those who aren’t fans or simply require an original and challenging gaming experience, this game is not for you. At first glance, one may tend to blame the lacking in these areas to the fact that this is an E rated game. However, the fact that there are many E rated games out there that are a blast for adults to play trumps this argument. Whatever the reasoning it does not excuse the fact that this game does not live up to the creativity of its name sake and certainly is not what is expected of something with Mr. Burton’s name on it.