Open Season

Yogi Bear's got a lot to answer for. By anthropomorphising what's essentially a mass of muscle, teeth and claws, bears are no longer perceived as the fearsome beasts they should be. Bears are supposed to be scary, not cute and lovable!

Sadly Open Season isn't going to change any minds. Based on the animated movie of the same name, you play as Boog the bear and Elliot the… well, moose, it would appear, or something else with antlers.

Boog and Elliot are your typical talking forest-dwellers whose comfy life of scavenging chocolate bars and pestering the local mammal population is disturbed by the start of hunting season. All of a sudden the forest's filled with hunters, and it's up to the unlikely twosome to do their best to save themselves and their furry friends.

What follows is a platform romp that is, given the cutesy subject matter, surprisingly enjoyable and genuinely good fun.

You start off as Boog, and the first level takes you through Open Season's basic controls. It's the standard stuff, walking and jumping and so on. But it doesn't take long for the twinkle-in-the-eye lunacy to begin, which transforms the game from what would otherwise be a formulaic movie licence into something that you'll get a kick out of whether you've seen the movie or not.

Rabbits. That's what it all comes down to and without them you wouldn't get very far at all. There are rabbit holes scattered throughout all of the games' dozen or so levels, and when one of the long-eared inhabitants pops its head above ground, Boog is able to scare them silly with his roar.

Once stunned, Boog can catch them and then hurl them at things to further his cause. The target might be one of the sleeping beavers that lie around at key points which, when awake, are able to provide platforms that enable you to reach otherwise inaccessible areas. Or it might be a brick wall that you need to break through, a tin can-throwing squirrel that needs to be subdued or a dynamite-tossing hunter.

In short, rabbits haven't been this catchy since they came up with mixomatosis.

You aim them by pressing '5', which brings up crosshairs on the screen that move up and down. When they pass over your intended target, you press '5' again to chuck Flopsy. You can bounce rabbits off walls, platforms and just about anything else you can see, and it's brilliant fun.

Elliot's able to do the same, scaring them with a comically amusing hooter, but he's also able to hide in hedges to sneak around. While you can't switch between the two lead characters mid-level, they each have levels designed to play to their particular strengths, and it's this variation that keeps Open Season from becoming routine or stale.

You'll probably be hooked enough to play through the entire game in one sitting, and that's the only real flaw: it's all over far too soon. Although there are three difficulty levels to play through and plenty of hidden areas to explore, it's so much fun that you wish there was more of it.

What there is, though, you'll enjoy, and there's enough temptation in exploring the parts of each level that you missed the first time around to return and try it again. Which means that we can forgive Open Season for continuing to make bears cute. They'd just better not do a sequel starring sharks.