great game, good way to kill half an hour.

The game is based on the movie though with many significant differences.  For one thing the movie all leads up to the kid you play ( kevin) defending his house from the 'wet bandits', so named because after theyre done robing the houses they flood them.
In the game, you dont really start with much clue as to how to play, you just have to go around, protecting the neighbours houses.  Its christmas and theyre all on holiday, as are youre familly who accidentally left you behind.
The games made a great deal more difficult due to the fact you cant actually tell where the bandits will go next.  You can follow them but they periodically go off the map to lick there wounds and stash there loot.
You get around the neighbourhood on your sledge (which i guess is rocketpowered since it goes along flat ground and up kurbs without having to stop.

You can find various weapons and components (which can be turned into weapons) by exploring houses and the general neighbour hood, as well as ammo for your weapons to be.

If you reach a house before the bandits you get an architects map (dont ask me how the kid got it ) and can stragetically place traps.  Since this pauses the game a good tactic is to sled just in front of the bandits van until you know where theyre going, and then beat them to the door.

When you and the bandits are in the house there are 2 bars.  Pain, and loot (if you have a weapon, an ammo bar too)
Basically, they rob little circular safes on walls all over the house (i guess the owners are all loaded then) and this gradualy fills the loots bars.  Traps that you set, such as marbles, glue, toycars etc all drive the pain ratings up although the best method is to use the gnarly weapons.  If you open up the combination menu you can make weapons from the various items you have gathered like glue guns and pepper guns.
You need to make the pain bar fill before the loot bar fills, manage this and you get a score and watch them running off.  They will then disapear for a while before hitting the next house, the aim is to save as many as possible.
If you fail the house is flooded and you cant get back in.
When your ammo bar depletes you need to collect more ammo.
Obviously there have to be somethings to make it difficult.  One is that if they catch you they stick you on a convenient reinforced wall hook and you need to mash the dpad to get down, during this time theyre happilly robbing away.  this gets particularly annoying when you break free only to land in the arms of one of them as they walk by.
Aditionally, the houses have there own dangers.
One house has a spider which knocks you, and the bandits down, a robot that administers a nasty electric shock, a ghost that knocks you over, and 1 house has floor boards that give way making navigation hard (stupidly, falling to the floor below dosent actually stun you)

Graphics-7
Yeh, theyre nothing special, they werent groundbreaking nor where they terrible, they delivered more or less what you would expect from the platform.
The NP'cs reactions are pretty funny though, you should check that out to see for yourself.


Sound-7
Not bad actually, theres the intro music, a track for when youre on youre sled, and a unique one for each house, they actually (surprisingly) made the effort on that front.  The tracks are decent too, suiting there atmosphere, an eerie one for the ghostly house, a futuristic one for the robot house, a fairely standard one for kevins house etc.
The weapons make alrigt noises too but the characters and the traps dont really make any noise which is dissapointing, there reactions are pretty funny though.


Addictiveness-10
Its just the kind of game you play occasionaly, not every day but its really not hard to end up playing 15 minutes every few days, its just an entertaining little game.


Story-1
Yeh, it falls flat here, the movies story was great, but like so many retro games based off movies, they just never even bothered including the story into the game


Depth-3
How long it takes technically depends on what difficulty you play it on, but really it wont last longer than about 15 minutes (because thats what the easy difficulty sets the timer at).  When said timer expires the police arrive to pick up whats left of the bandits.


Difficulty-7
That realy depends, its not too difficult to get a reasonabe score on easy, bt its not a clear cut win ose game.  I suppose if you wanted to save every house, that is pretty difficult, especially if you venture to the higher difficulties.


This game will nevr be alone, because in my mind at least, it joins the ranks of other greats on the shelf of legendary, a fun game and certainly, unique, i give it, 9.2