Cookie & Cream

The Good
The amount of 3D detail in the game is scaled pretty well. There's a decent amount of presentation in cutscenes and gameplay. Sounds are okay and music is pleasant to listen to in each stage. After scratching the surface, this is where the fun turns into frustration rather quickly.

The Bad
The platforming in this game really does not work with this tilted down angle. You'll find yourself blindly taking leaps of faith in a vain effort to cross a gap or elevate to higher ground only to fall lots of times to your doom and waste more and more of your precious seconds. This is not helped by the fact that there's no shadow to indicate how high above ground you are. With this bunny hop you have, you can't even make the distance over longer gaps, Cookie is just not like Bugs Bunny.

Timing and Precision are the two most aggravating things you have to have to get far in the game. Every stage requires you to reach the finish in a limited time, so don't try taking the time to familiarise with the level, unless you want to restart over and over again. And when Precision comes into play, it's very specific. You need to run right into clocks to pick them up, you cannot pick them up by being adjacent to them. If you take too long, some pesky bird will peck at you deducting your time and serve to mock all your efforts. Every puzzle with Cream requires precision from pretty much all of your inputs and hints are anything but helpful. You'd better have that microphone with you, because if you don't then you're mashing random buttons hoping to make a mechanism actually work. There's virtually no feedback or revealed solution to get through the puzzles and the time you spend on each stage drags on and on and on.

The Bottom Line
This portable game falls way below the capabilities of the PlayStation 2 version of Cookie & Cream. Trying to cram all that cookie PS2 goodness into the DS only got the game creamed. The game is so broken, even speedrunners would not find it rewarding. The bad angle, poor controls, and overuse of peripherals make for a heavily unbalanced game. They should have taken lessons from the GBA Spyro games and made a decent top-down oriented game with proper puzzles for Cream to help Cookie. This game will only go downhill the more you play it and so will your patience. Play only if you want to beat yourself up.