Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Cloudy with a Meatballs is advertised as another easy 1,000 points and it did not disappoint. The complete score can be achieved within 8 hours of gameplay.

You play as Flint Lockwood and go around various locations to remove the copious amounts of food produced by his... his... food producing machine with a name I cannot remember. The basic storyline is that you have to get from A to B in all levels. That’s it, there’s not really a lot more to it.

In terms of gameplay it is very simple. You have five different tools at your disposal which can be used to destroy the various foods around the levels. Once again, the game play is very clean with very little problems with glitches or the playable character getting stuck and being unable to continue – a common theme in other games.

Visually it is cartoony and nothing more than I would expect from an animated movie adaptation, however it loses massive points for the sound effects. Flint has a name for each of his tools and certain catchphrases for when he selects them from his inventory. These names and sayings become incredibly annoying really, really quickly and what’s worse is that the kids think they are funny and so will repeat them over and over and over again as well, making me scream bloody murder inside my head.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

As stated earlier, it’s a simple 1,000 points with not a lot of variety. You have to complete the game (a given), destroy all the hydrogenated food pods hidden (I use this term very loosely) throughout the levels and use your weapons in certain ways a certain number of times.

I only had trouble with one level when trying to find the hydrogenated food pods and had to use a video to find it, however the others are generally in plain sight. The levels are very straightforward with few hidden areas.

The main problems came from the weapon based achievements. You only get given a specific set of weapons at the beginning of each level and there are achievements for destroying certain types of foods with certain weapons. However, certain foods only appear in certain levels so you have to replay levels a few times in order to get the required kills. The most notable of these is the achievement for cutting 25 marshmallows. You only have the cutter in maybe two levels where there are marshmallows and you need to get 25 of them. I think I had to replay one level seven times in order to get this.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is an easy game that has replay value for kids only; a standard summary for a game that doesn’t break any boundaries in the genre. That said, should a game for kids based on a kid’s film be looking to break boundaries? Probably not, but it does teach kids that sugar is bad and I did feel a little bit sick after being bombarded with all the food!