However, now that Tak has his own Nickelodeon TV show, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that we're getting a new Tak game from publisher THQ. I haven't followed the show, so I'm not sure how tightly this fits that storyline, or whether this fits in with the original game trilogy, but for the most part the character feels and looks much like I remember.

Tak himself is controlled by the Wii remote and the nunchuk, with most of your actual movement being based on the analog stick, with specific motions used for certain moves on the remote, along with a couple button presses. There's nothing particularly inventive about the control scheme used here, but it works well enough within the game.

Tak is given a few special abilities that are specific to the storyline, like allowing himself to be rolled up in a ball of slime, which lets him stick to the surfaces covered in goo that cover most of the levels, giving you a bit of a Metroid Prime sensation when you have to navigate ceilings and walls to get to the next platform.

However, the game feels like less of a platformer and more of a brawler to me, in the sense that there are countless hordes of enemies tossed at Tak, each with a small variation (melee, ranged, strong, etc), and after a while it all starts to feel pretty mindless, considering how often you need to knock these guys out. Granted, you can probably run thru most of the stages and dodge a lot of the enemy encounters, simply because the game gives you a trail of blue dots that act like bread crumbs in a sense, guiding you to the exit for each level.

The only time the design really starts to show any sense of ingenuity is with the various boss battles, but even those are mostly brainless encounters, usually requiring you to figure out one gimmick and use it over and over to finish the fight. They're never too difficult, and the entire game doesn't present much of a challenge to experienced players. Instead, it definitely feels like more of a younger kids title than the previous entry of Tak that I played, which felt more like a general All Ages game. I suppose the watering down of the character thru an animated show might have something to do with this, and it's disappointing to see the character take this turn for the mundane.

Visually it's not much of a step up from the previous Tak either, which is pretty poor considering it's on new hardware that can definitely do a bit more than what we see here. I know it's easy to knock the Wii for being a slightly revamped Gamecube, but we've seen better efforts from other developers when it comes to similar titles, and there's a lot of sprucing up that could be on this Tak title to make better use of the hardware at hand. The music doesn't fare much better, and everything has this underlying jungle theme that sounds really annoying and repetitive after a while. The VA stuff seems to be taken from the TV show, but not being really familiar with the source I can't tell you how accurate it is, just that I didn't find it annoying or grating.

Basically, the newest Tak entry is a substandard platforming/brawler hybrid that just doesn't manage to do anything for me. The controls work well, and it certainly looks like a Tak game, but the featureless enemies that you're constantly bombarded with grow old quickly, and the lack of any real solid platforming elements take away what I remember being fun from the first title. If you were a fan of the original (or even the sequels), don't expect much from this entry, as it certainly isn't the return that I would have hoped for from a game series that has been absent for a few years now.