It's a law of nature -- Video games based on other forms of media tend to suck. The most noteable example of this are the past Simpsons games. Futurama, the little brother of The Simpsons, also falls into this category.

Futurama is set to a story of "Mom" (a lovable mascot for a megaconglomorate company), who buys Planet Express, and thus ends up owning 51% of the Earth and then throwing the shackles of a dictatorship on it. It's up to Fry, Leela, Bender, Hermes, Amy and the Professor to sort the problem out. And they got quite a few of them to sort out. The game starts off pretty boring with a rudimentary "here's how to work the controls" first stage, but has hilarious set-ups to describe how the game works (when you first obtain Fry's Hammer, you'll know what I mean.)

Let's start on the graphics. While they're alright as far as gameplay goes, the cutscenes really don't seem to "work" with the cel-shading technique. Half the characters don't really look like their cartoon counterparts. The game also suffers from some massive slowdown mid-stage when you hit a checkpoint or get into a heavily animated area. The audio is great for what it's supposed to be. The game has all the sound clips intact, so you'll be able to hear Bender tell you off or hear Fry be a dope. Soundtrack is pure Futurama, as well, composed of various songs featured in the show.

Here's where it gets ugly. Because 95% of the time a 3D platformer game has awful camera troubles, you can expect a whole lot of them in this game coupled with mediocre control. Sometimes you'll suffer from a lack of depth perception and land right in front of the edge of a pit, and fall to your death. This gets frustrating. Also, sometimes your character will simply refuse to perform a said action (a number of times I've "ran" into a pit because the jump didn't register.)

The game plays like a pretty standard platform action game, so if that's your thing you might enjoy Futurama. If you're a die-hard Futurama fan, you might enjoy this game. If you're bored on a Saturday night, you may enjoy renting this game. Otherwise, you might want to go into cryo-freeze for 1000 years and wait for something better to come out.

· · · cka