The movie Coraline is, in my eyes, a fantastic movie that was well worth spending out the money to watch. The story of the film revolved around a young girl called, you guessed it, Coraline, who lived in a apartment along with her (neglecting) parents and some bizarre neighbours. She stumbles upon a strange little door which takes her to a parallel world to her own - a world where her parents are very loving and attentive, and where everything is much more interesting. The storyline was eerie, dark and imaginative, and very easily won over a lot of people. You'd think the game based on the movie should at least be a decent effort. But no.

The game is, to be blunt, boring. The gameplay mostly consists of exploration and mini-games/puzzles, which doesn't sound bad down on paper, but trust me, it's bad.

The exploration is perhaps the better part of this game, but not by much since exploring and wandering the same areas over and over again can get easily repetitive. That, and the fact that Coraline moves so slowly and clumsily makes exploring a tedious task. There may be times when you need to move boxes around to access a particular area that you need to get to (since Coraline can't jump). While pushing and pulling boxes are simple enough, picking them up and moving while holding them can be annoying - Coraline moves slowly and sometimes it becomes a task just to turn her around - you'll find yourself tapping on a direction trying to get her to turn and Coraline will step backwards instead. When you do manage to get her to turn, she takes her sweet time about it.

The mini-games/puzzles range from ridiculously easy to stupidly difficult. There are various different types of mini-games, so the game does attempt to try to be fresh and different on every turn, but that's not saying much. There are many times when you'll be required to find certain things or press buttons in a certain order at a certain time. There are also many quick-time events, where you have to press a button combination as quickly as possible - these can be ridiculously tricky sometimes even for an adult, let alone the target audience of a child. On top of that, one such mini-game/puzzle early in the game is extremely annoying in that the AI near always seems to beat you, meaning concentration is a must, but even that sometimes gets you nowhere. The controls seem to work well enough apart from turning Coraline while holding a box and shooting with your slingshot which can be awkward and takes getting used to.

You can also collect buttons throughout the game by interacting with various objects and completing very small tasks. These buttons can be used to buy things or skip puzzles/tasks that you don't want to do... if you have enough of them, which I never seem to.

The graphics for this game are not exactly top-notch either, the character models look bland and boring though the design of the house and outside does not look too bad, to say the least.

One positive thing that can be said about this game is the voice-acting - the characters all fit into their roles nicely, as they did in the film, and even the music fits the eerie feel of the game, thus it's nice to listen to.

The ultimate problem is that the gameplay is just not very fun, it's boring due to most of the tasks being so easy and on some occasions, frustrating due to a few of the tasks being so difficult. On top of that, the game is very short and can be beat in roughly three hours or so. Unless you swear by absolutely anything Coraline-related, this game is not worth getting, not even for young children.