The story revolves around the famous fat and lazy orange tabby cat who just happens to end up eating much more than his mind can handle, resulting in the occurrence of terrible nightmares. To get out of his nightmare state, Garfield has to make his way through roughly two dozen levels, collecting alarm clocks to bring him back to reality. While the story isn’t exactly compelling, it’s suitable for a kid’s game. However, the game lacks references to typical Garfield trademarks. The biggest crime of all is that, while the game is centred on Garfield, there is absolutely no love shown for his favourite food – lasagna. Instead, Garfield makes his way through each level collecting donuts and pizza pieces. So as you'd expect, the actual homage to the Garfield series is amiss. No familiar characters, not nearly enough comic strips and Garfield lacks his typically lazy and witty attitude, and is instead replaced by a lifeless character that just jumps and jumps, and jumps some more.
Garfield’s Nightmare is a 2.5D side-scroller that features your standard platforming gameplay. The goal for each level is to travel from one side of the game world to the other. In-between this, you’ll need to collect various items and kill bad guys that generally pose little threat to your progression. Making your way through each level is extremely easy, as all you’re required to do is jump from platform to platform, or simply jump on bad guys to avoid death. There's certainly no challenge to speak of, and there are no special moves to perform – just boring and simple jumping.
Can you feel the excitement?
The game takes Garfield to four unique locations – a castle, a lava area, a sky area and an ice area. There are five levels in each of these locations, with the final level in each area being a battle against a boss character that Garfield needs to defeat in order to claim an alarm clock. The fundamentals are virtually the same in each area, with basic jumping and minor block-moving puzzles the only gameplay areas to overcome.
There’s just very little excitement at all in this game. Areas feel dull, the controls are reduced to only a few buttons and the lack of Garfield references is terrible. For a DS game, the developers have rarely touched on the functions available to them. Throughout most of the game, the second screen is used as a means to monitor how many items you’ve collected throughout the game. The only real feature the developers have utilised is the graphical power of the handheld. The presentation is very rich, and often looks surprisingly well-detailed for a DS game. Unfortunately, the lack of variety and features in each level hurt the overall quality of the presentation.
While the obvious focus for Garfield’s Nightmare was to satisfy kids, there’s very little to occupy the little ones for long periods of time. The graphics are pretty, though everything else feels incredibly ordinary, with the intentions solely being focused on tacking Garfield’s name onto a lifeless affair. The game is far too simple and offers very little to anyone who buys it – there are much better alternatives available.
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