G-Force (iPhone)

In real life, guinea pigs don't do all that much. They just eat, scurry, and poop until the day when you find them stiff and lifeless in their roller ball in the corner of your room.

Sad as you might feel at their passing, you have to admit they never exactly made good conversational partners, did they? In fact, if they did you should probably seek help.

In the world of G-Force, these bucktoothed rodents are special agents, saboteurs, and elite espionage machines. They still scurry, but the only reason you'll find them dead in a corner is if they've set off an alarm and have been pumped full of hot anti-spy lead.

G-Force puts you in control of a band of guinea pigs as they infiltrate top secret installations. The aim is to grab power cubes that appear at the end of each level. However, the levels are monitored by security cameras, gun emplacements, and other obstacles. You're also working against a strict time limit.

Each rodent has different abilities and items they can equip from a power arm for moving blocks or a boomerang that can destroy gun emplacements and activate switches. The game is picky about which character you use at each part of the level, making it much more a puzzle than an action game.

Indeed, your character moves in increments as if tied to a grid. The guinea pigs can't even walk past each other on the same spot, making careful movements even more essential.

With 12 levels in total, you're looking at about an hour and a half of gameplay in total, with little incentive to replay afterward. Much of that time is spent on retrying levels after getting caught by security cameras. Taking care to avoid their sight prevents you from getting caught, but you'll probably run out of time as a result.

For a game based on a children's film, the amount of ingenuity packed into the levels is fairly impressive, though with a few head-scratching moments. There are also decent mini-game interludes when you need to crack codes and hack computers.

Even if you are paying attention to the puzzles, there are three elements waiting to trip you up. Firstly, characters may have different names, but visually they're indistinct. Unless you know your G-Force universe facts inside out, you're sure to end up with the wrong character in the wrong place at the wrong time just because you haven't squinted hard enough.

Secondly, nice as the 3D graphics are they complicate play. At times your view isn't clear enough to see nearby guns. Thirdly, later levels rely on a whole lot of back-tracking, just so that you can get character X to object Y, instead of character Z who's there at the moment.

On their own, none of these complaints would be all that bad, but as a trio they have a knack of making G-Force tedious. Without the charms of its animation inspiration, the premium price tag for this admirable attempt isn't able to sneak by us.