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Activision is making quite a name for themselves in the license properties game. Previous efforts including Spider-Man 2 and X-Men Legends made the most of their respective source material, and now, we can add Shark Tale to that list. That’s not to say that Shark Tale will blow your mind, but it makes good use of its license, and is recommendable to fans of the movie.

For those of you unfamiliar with Shark Tale, let me give you a quick up-to-date: in Shark Tale, you control Oscar, a wise cracking fish who ends up taking credit for the accidental death of a mob boss’s son. The mob, a group of sharks, spends the majority of the game trying to find and kill Oscar, who becomes known as the ‘Shark Slayer’. It’s a light hearted fare that should keep the kids happy, and even entertain an adult or two.

While most licensee games focus solely on one style of gameplay, Shark Tale breaks up the monotony by giving you 4 different ways to play during the game: dancing, fighting, racing and adventuring. The game is broken up into 25 chapters, none of which are usually too long, and each broken up into one of the aforementioned play styles. The overall result is a game that stays fresh feeling until you finish it, which is an enjoyable turn of events from the monotonous gameplay found in most licensed games.

The race portions of the game are pretty well done. The opening segment of the game has you swimming away from a huge shark that intends to have you for dinner. You avoid being eaten by moving Oscar to the corresponding spots on the screen as quickly as possible. This section isn’t overly challenging, but still pretty fun. Other races will have you dodging pedestrians and zipping in and out of traffic while trying to win. Not something that will distract you from NFSU, but something to be enjoyed none the less.

Adventuring in Reef City (the locale of Shark Tale) consists of side scrolling levels that require you to complete certain objectives, like finding an item, or erasing graffiti tags. The adventuring isn’t extremely deep, but for a game of Shark Tales subject matter, it keeps things simple, yet satisfying. Unfortunately, the adventuring becomes far too easy with the inclusion of being able to restore a good portion of your health by swimming into any of the houses in Reef City and eating food off the tables (which is done automatically, no dinner simulators, sorry). Since there’s houses everywhere, you’ll pretty much never be at a loss of health.

One of the few things you might have known about Shark Tale before reading this review is that the game boasts some DDR style dance gameplay. During certain segments of the game, Oscar will find himself busting a move for whatever reason, and it plays just like DDR does: press the corresponding button on the D-Pad at the right time to break it down. In an interesting, and welcome twist, the PS2 and Xbox versions even support the DDR dance pad!

Visually, Shark Tale is pretty solid. The game, much like the movie, offers up some very bright, very bold colors that really give you that tropical feel. While the graphics won’t ‘wow’ you in any way, they do a good job of recreating the atmosphere brought out by the movie, and are overall pretty sharp. The audio is also fairly well done. A decent soundtrack accompanies the on-screen goings-on with some fun tropical sounding light tunes to bob your head to while you traverse the streets of Reef City, or race through it. ‘Can’t Touch This’ accompanies the dance segments, which amuses me beyond all belief. The voice overs are done via sound-alikes from the movies cast who generally do a pretty good job of keeping the overall feel of the movie characters and their personalities.

When you consider how bad Shark Tale could have been, it turned out pretty good. None of the different gameplay styles can hold a candle to games that specifically fall into those respective genres, but as a compilation of them, Shark Tale could provide a good few hours of amusement for anyone that enjoyed the movie. If you haven’t seen the movie, and I’m sure there’s a few of you, the game can still provided some fun, light-hearted gameplay for a rainy day. Worth a rent, at least.