Created in 2018 and since then broadcast around the world, Bluey has greatly gained popularity among young people in recent months, to the point that a publisher who is fond of video game adaptations of successful franchises saw good potential in honor of the soberly titled Bluey: The video game. This publisher is Outright Games, well known for having brought licenses like Jumanji: Wild Adventures, The Grinch: Christmas Adventures And PAW Patrol World: Paw Patrol but also Dragons: Legends of the Nine Kingdoms, Peppa Pig: Adventures around the World or Gigantosaurus: The Game. All faithful adaptations with more or less interest for our young gamers.
For the first time therefore, Bluey and his family landed in our favorite medium in a game developed by the Spaniards Artax Games (whose official website does not even mention the game at present), this November 17 on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch at an average price of €40. And although this could have had a satisfactory result and been a game with good potential for the holidays, we must admit that this is the biggest wasted potential of the end of the year.
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Test conditions: We sat down, then got up after an hour of play, time to finish the story. Then we collected everything we needed to find and platinumed the game in just another hour, all on PlayStation 5.
Mom ! Dad ! Bingo! Bluey!
If you don’t know the cartoon Bluey, know that it features a little blue dog, Bluey, her sister Bingo, and their two parents, Bandit and Chilli respectively their father and their mother, most of the time in adventures and everyday scenes, always in the right direction. mood and advocating education through discovery and success. The Australian Cattle Dog family is united and always ends up resolving any conflicts or problems through dialogue and laughter.
And we must admit that for this first video game adaptation, the contract is fulfilled: the tone, the imagery and the situations encountered are perfectly faithful to the cartoon, to the point that the four adventures experienced by our family are brought to life. scene as on television with for example a voice-over title etc. The four members of the family are playable and everyone is well dubbed and subtitled in French, only, these will not be the official voices ( reserved for the original English version), which also repeat the same sentences over and over. Each episode of Bluey: The video game is initiated by cutscenes before letting the player take over, even if we criticize the too large proportion of cutscenes which intersperse (sometimes very abruptly) the scenes and actions, ultimately leaving only a little of pure playing time.
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Indeed, you have read it, the game is only made up of four adventures… The problem being that they only last 15 minutes maximum, thus bringing the playing time of the adventure to just under an hour. There is no doubt that this time will necessarily be increased if the child plays alone or supervised, but we were incredibly disappointed with the treatment provided for this first adaptation. What’s the point of offering a video game foray to only offer two thirds of cutscenes in such a short time?
However, recent works such as games Peppa Pig or the latest semi-open world game PAW Patrol World: Paw Patrol understood that we could satisfy children with short experiences without botching the work in question. So of course, each adventure is really well told, divided into several stages and really interesting to follow, in a sort of treasure hunt in several stages, allowing you to meet other members of the family like Chilli’s father or Bandit’s two brothers.
When will there be a little more consideration?
As for the core gameplay of Bluey: The video game, you explore most of the family home, in all the rooms, from the living room to the children’s bedroom, including the kitchen, the terrace and even the garden. But, strangely enough, the game will always be played with the camera facing the house, in horizontal scrolling with a 2.5D feel, the camera and collision problems inherent to this setting.
Everyday games are yours, such as scenes imagining the ground as lava, or a magic xylophone transforming people into statues, etc. In total, 4 poor mini-games are present, and playable endlessly via a wheel games. In addition to these mini-games, passages in the forest, on a beach or in a park are also present, thus opening up the settings, without however allowing great exploration, the game being extremely interventionist (or even too much). We must certainly not forget that the game is aimed at a very young audience, but once again, recent adaptations have shown us that it is possible to allow freedom and a refined heads-up display, while avoiding go through menus to continue the adventure, something impossible here.
In a sort of book of memories, Bluey will have to select the treasure map in question to continue the episodes while this book will also be used to select an area where the 30 stickers and the 60 objects to be collected in the 5 identified locations will be stored. This disproportion of main versus additional content is really strange, because its only interest is to glean something 100% easy but quite laborious, each discovery being highlighted by far too many animations and the same repeated sentences. Allow one more hour to collect everything, bringing the total game time to almost 2 hours at 100%, which once again is very, very short and too cheap for a game still sold for €40 recommended price!
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As for the technical part, in addition to horizontal scrolling which could disturb some young players, we had to face numerous bugs with characters getting stuck or walking in place for example, the choice between the four members of the family being possible at any time via a menu, as well as numerous collision bugs, signs of a game with unsatisfactory polish. And yet, we know that children could be a gold mine in terms of sales, their parents possibly being gamers too (the game can be played with several people in passing), but the publishers seem to want to continue their feeble efforts to offer adaptations worthy of the name.