Parents' Guide to Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier

This interactive movie tie-in looks great, but it falls flat in delivering a unique story based around your choices. When it comes to interactive entertainment like video games, there's always a question of how much control the player should have over the narrative of the experience. When it's done well, players can get pulled in as an active part of the story. Sometimes just making the effort to get from point A to point B can be enough to make players feel like they're living the role. Then there are games like Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier, which have their own story to tell and simply take the player along for the ride.

Now, the game does actually have a pretty good story, and the presentation is top-notch. The game looks and sounds like it could be right at home as a straight-to-DVD feature. The acting is well done and the computer models are extremely detailed. The problem comes with the "interactive" part of the interactive entertainment. Throughout the game, players are constantly making choices to direct the flow of the story. Bystanders can even get in on the action with the PlayLink app, voting as a group for which choices should be made. Unfortunately, those choices never really feel like they matter all that much. Instead of choices leading to truly branching plots, every road feels like it leads right back to the same place. You never feel like you're the one directing the story, but rather the story always feels like it's the one directing you. And since choosing the story's path is the only purpose the player serves, with no action elements or such to add any extra layer of interactivity, it's hard to feel any sort of investment in what's going on.