Genre: Action/Adventure
Developer: Phoenix Games Studio
Publisher: Ubisoft
Release Date: February 8, 2005

Buy 'WINNIE THE POOH: Rumbly Tumbly Adventure':
Game Boy Advance | GameCube | PlayStation 2

Winnie the Pooh's Rumbly Tumbly Adventure isn't meant for the adults who had grown up with Winnie the Pooh and always loved the cartoon. Rather, this is meant for the younger generation who is currently growing up with our favorite honey-lover so you should only keep reading if you're morbidly curious or if you plan on giving the title to an up-and-coming gamer.

Winnie the Pooh's Rumbly Tumbly Adventure has three different modes of play: junior, adventure, and lastly, mini-games. Junior mode is for the extremely young, where they just go around hit X on the lit circles to see a CG event (which sadly takes a good amount of time to load). For example, if they see a balloon with a lit circle around it, Winnie the Pooh may pop it, or, in junior mode, it would temporarily lift him up into the air. It's not exactly much fun for someone my age, but I can see some really young toddlers or children enjoying it. The other mode, mini-games, is a group of small games which you can play with another player. Available games are: Cookie Maze (grab all the cookies before the Heffalumps and Woozles do), Catch the Honey Pot (try to catch the honey pot, and you can even be the pot and try to not get caught) , Find the Cookies (where you kick background objects to grab cookies before the others), Follow the Line! (try to stay as close as possible to the white dotted line; finish Piglet and Roo's birthday adventures to unlock), and lastly, The Scare off! (taken directly from the last Pooh game, Piglet's Big Movie, where you try to scare off another opponent; finish entire game to unlock). These extra additions are nice, but the main mode of play is, of course, adventure mode.

In adventure mode, you take Pooh through a series of adventures to celebrate his friends' birthdays, as well as his own. During these birthday adventures, there will be several small tasks that are handed to you; the tasks are very linear and quite easy to accomplish. In Roo's adventure, you try to get Tigger to teach Roo his super duper jump skill, but in order to do so, you will have several tasks to accomplish, which are given to you one step at a time.

At times, you may even face enemies, and the battles differ, depending on the character you are currently controlling. Pooh will avoid the enemy and try to reach the balloon, which he will pop in order to scare away the enemies. When you are Tigger, the enemy battles change over to a stealth mode, where you try to sneak by the enemy without being seen. To do this, you will need to avoid the enemies' fields of vision, and because of Tigger's stealth, you can go right behind them, and they won't be the wiser. Piglet's enemy battles (which have been my favorite since the previous Winnie the Pooh installment) involve scaring off the enemy by correctly tapping the correct button sequence before the enemy reaches you. Since the game's main focus is on Pooh, you only require the assistance of the other characters in order to overcome obstacles that Pooh himself can't handle.

The other objective that Pooh needs to do is find hidden honey pots and music notes (three in each adventure, marked as a light blue object). Pooh seems to have a sixth sense for hidden honey pots, and the map reflects this, with mystery spots blinking yellow. You will then need to go to these spots and hit the X button to kick the rock, pumpkin, fence, etc., in order to collect the honey pots. If you fail the first time, you can kick it again to try and catch them again, repeating the process until you are successful.

Each stage of the map has a total of 15 honey pots hidden in three objects, and while finding them is easy, catching them is actually the most difficult part of the game. Pooh is kind of sluggish, and the honey pots can bounce out of their hiding places like rubber balls. You also have no camera control so you have to hope that the honey pots will go in the direction you've planned. Add these issues to a slow, waddling bear, and you may not have enough time to pick up all of the honey. You need the honey in order to lure away the bees, which are usually blocking a key item and refuse to leave until provided with a certain amount of honey pots.

One thing that is nice about this game is that there is only one key object per section, so you can never get lost or be frustrated about having done any puzzles out of order. The game progress is very linear and doesn't allow room for the gamer to make mistakes, but that's quite beneficial, given the game's young target audience.

So Winnie the Pooh's Rumbly Tumbly Adventure is quite easy, and anyone with a basic grasp of English can pick this up and play it. Pooh can't do all of this adventuring alone, and he will need the help and advice of Owl, Rabbit, Kanga, Eeyore, Roo,Gopher, Piglet, and Tigger. Tiger and Piglet seem to be used to open up paths to move on, Eeyore is used as a horse to catch butterflies, frogs, etc., and Gopher, Rabbit, and Owl give helpful advice about the section's key object. When you manage to find the object, you will get to enjoy a nice little cut scene, with voice actors speaking their parts.

The voice acting is great, and everyone sounds just like the original cast, which is sure to bring back memories. Overall, the sound in the game is somewhat questionable: it just isn't be the great sound with which I've been acquainted. There also seems to be a bug with the audio, where at times, the volume would just cut out and require you to turn up the volume on the television set.

What makes up for it the audio is its accurate portrayal of the characters. They still look the same and resemble the cartoon rather closely. The real cream of the crop, however, is the background. The detail and objects on the map make it seem so elaborate and decorative that it really seems like a fixed-up and glorified Hundred Acre woods.

Winnie the Pooh's Rumbly Tumbly Adventure is a good game any Pooh-loving youngster who wants an easy game with five levels. The gameplay is quite linear so the game is beatable rather quickly, and the replay value is fairly low because once you've beaten the game, all that is left is to tackle the mini-games or run around in adventure mode. For parents looking for a good game for young children, this would be a great purchase. I personally prefer Piglet's Big Movie, but that is for the slightly older kids.

Score: 7.7/10