Publisher: Disney Interactive Studios
Developer: Disney Interactive Studios
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now

So I’m a grown man who knows exactly in which house of Hogwarts the students at his law school belong. It takes a real nerd to admit that. I used to be a little cheesed at J.K. Rowling for not giving America its own school of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Wizards of Waverly Place shows us why J.K didn’t bother: such a school would be run by Disney and populated by the daughters of country music stars, with most of the magic used to prepare and convey food.

Disney Interactive Studios has clearly accepted that only fans of the TV show or movie would buy Wizards, as they didn’t bother to include any exposition or semblance of a plot. Having had no prior contact with the franchise, I neither knew nor eventually learned who the characters were or how they related to one another. This isn’t a game about the Wizards of Waverly, it’s a game in which the characters were plucked from Waverly Place and placed in generic mini-games.

The gameplay mainly centers around casting spells by tracing paterns on the DS screen with the stylus. The “stylus as a wand” concept is a surprisingly clever control scheme, although it doesn’t change the fact that you’re using magic to make sandwiches. There’s very little room for creativity in your spell casting, since the spells are fairly limited in both number and use and most objects aren’t affected by them. Also, the game practically tells you how to complete your objectives. This makes for a very poor action/adventure experience, as the puzzles are pretty much solved for you.

Wizards also sports an online mode for those who have set up a Dgamer account. In the online mode, you can play against others in the minigames you’ve unlocked in story mode. While this is much more fun than playing the games alone, it gets old quickly. And you’ve still got to endure the story mode to unlock the minigames in the first place.

Even for the DS, the graphics in Wizards are nothing special. While there’s a lot of detail in the environments, characters and objects are often pixilated, and anyone who doesn’t enjoy the giant-head-tiny-body BRATZ aesthetic will probably be put off by the look of the game. The music is repetitive, generic and annoying. The interface can sometimes be frustrating when the DS fails to execute a spell that you’ve correctly traced, but for the most part it responds well.

If you’re a huge fan of the series, Wizards of Waverly Place might be worth a look. Even so, don’t go in expecting any real story or clever dialogue. This game has very little to do with the series, and is simply banking on its name to sell an otherwise lackluster game.

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