  In Madagascar, the lion tamer's rings finally get their revenge...
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While definitely not a game for adults, Madagascar for the Xbox successfully translates a half-way decent movie into a halfway-decent game. Children who enjoyed the movie will certainly find a lot to like in Madagascar, but anyone else may be put off by the short, repetitive gameplay, and the far too common cut-scenes with poorly impersonated voice acting.
Madagascar the game follows the exact same simple plot as the movie. Alex the Zebra wants to escape the zoo to find the "wild", he follows some crafty penguins out into New York, gets caught by "The Man" and is returned to the zoo only to be released the next day on a boat to Madagascar with his friends. While in Madagascar they meet some annoying characters, do some boring stuff, talk about some pointless things, and eventually live happily ever after... or something like that. The truth is that I found both the movie and the game's plot to be very lifeless and uninteresting. Perhaps its because I'm not 10 anymore.
While adventuring with Alex and his team of friends you are faced with some standard platforming gameplay, running around, jumping puzzles, basic combat and collecting pointless junk (coins, balloons, etc) for rewards. I found the gameplay to be uninspiring, offering nothing new and almost no challenge from beginning to end. Some variety could be found in using the 4 different characters with separate abilities, but it does little to distract you away from the shallow gameplay. It's not a "bad" by any means, just far too simple for today's standards. Anyone looking for a good platformer should look elsewhere.
As if the gameplay wasn't stale enough already, every few minutes you are treated with long speeches from characters in the game. These cut-scenes both look very poor because of the weak graphics engine and sound dreadful because of poor voice impersonations, which is disappointing as the graphics and the voice acting were the only things going for the movie.
