Barbie has been grist for the feminist mill for several decades now. Her pretty, perky smile and overachieving Type-A personality has always rubbed some women the wrong way. But perhaps feminists should turn their critical eye towards a new target: the Bratz doll. Instead of projecting the positive, can-do spirit of Barbie, the Bratz are cliquish, vapid underachievers who teach girls that nothing is more important than shopping. Not school. Not work. Not family. Bratz: The Movie reiterates this point.
Developed by Blitz Games and published by THQ, Bratz: The Movie revolves around four girls named Cloe, Yasmin, Sasha and Jade. These teens with a self-proclaimed "passion for fashion" live and work above a stripmall in the town of--wait for it--Stylesville. Their lives consist of cruising trendy boutiques for new threads and then writing about their harrowing experience in their publication, Bratz Magazine. The girls lead a pretty sweet life that's only occasionally disrupted, mainly by rival fashion editor Burdine Maxwell, creator of Your Thing and doppelganger of Barbie (or is it Vogue's Anna Wintour?)
The game is divided up into various chapters, each with its own storyline. In every chapter you're given control of one of the four Bratz girls and must complete a series of shopping tasks that will be written about in the magazine. Assignments include snapping up popular designer labels, roller blading around town picking up coins and missing items, and catching up on all the latest gossip. Expect no in-depth storyline here. The game is aimed at tweens and makes no attempt to hide it.
Of course, the lack of a story won't matter much to little girls, who just want to dress up their Bratz dolls and enjoy upbeat music about girl power. We wish we could give gameplay a thumb's up for at least being mindless entertainment, but unfortunately it's even more tedious than the vacuous storyline.
For those of you want to spice things up a bit, you might be dissapointed to know that you can't rename your Bratz Paris, Britney, Nicole and Lindsey. You can however hit the mall so that the girls can at least dress the part. It's alarmingly easy. Every shop has a wide variety of hot pants, mini skirts and tight T-shirts. Shoes consist of strappy heels and calf-hugging boots. All that's missing is the naughty Catholic school girl outfit, which you can make after taking a few design lessons. You can even buy a dog or cat and dress it up too. Admittedly this ability to mix and match different looks is entertaining. For awhile. But it will quickly get boring. You're be better off going to the local ice rink and practicing a few moves with the Wii remote, or racing your friends around the mall by waggling the controller to try and get your character to turn corners and fly past the competition.
While these mini games provide a break in the overall tedium, it's hard to enjoy them because of the camera, which has the turning radius of a rusty pinto with a broken steering wheel. Not only will you have a hard time seeing where you're going, you'll end up having more conversations with walls than people since that's all you see while trying to talk to NPCs. And using the game's camera phone is equally annoying, since in order to take a decent picture you have to be at the exact right angle. Frustrating doesn't even begin to describe it.
The only real positive thing to say about the gameplay is that the HUD is easy to access. It's cleverly disguised as a cellphone the girls carry around with them, and each option is clearly labled and accessed with a quick press of a button. The layout of Stylesville is pretty confusing, so it's nice to be able to find stores using the location tool. It's also handy to be able to keep track of assignements by consulting the phone's planner, since you can do multiple activities at once.
The graphics in this game are pretty poor, which isn't unexpected for a game of rather low caliber, but it's still frustrating to have to deal with everything from major texture ripping to jittery frame rates. One example of this is a scene where one Bratz doll is standing in the middle of the screen talking, suddenly teleports several inches to the left, then reappeares in the middle. This happens quite a few times in the game. The cutscenes are spared this oddity, but are still low-grade, meaning they're passable and nothing more.
Not all the news is bad though. The music is light-hearted and full of positive messages (be true to yourself/be an individual), and there's a pretty healthy selection of tunes to choose from. There's also a change in scenery every once in awhile(for example the girls jet off to London to do a celebrity interview), and this keeps the environment from becoming too stale. Neither of these things is enough to make up for terrible gameplay and faulty framerates, but it keeps the game from being a complete failure.
