Wow, another game based on National Geographic documentary! And it just so happened to be a random GBA game I picked to play. I was actually hopeful that it wouldn't be as bad as Arctic Tale for the same system, maybe mediocre, but that would still be a better experience. All I knew going in is that it was based on a documentary and that it is a Lemmings-like. Unfortunately, this game is terrible.

For the most part, the game plays like Lemmings, though you don't assign penguins to various jobs to progress. Instead, you use various tools to get them to the end of the level, while collecting a set amount of snowflakes scattered about. Tools like bouncy tents or snowballs so the penguins can safely jump down high ledges (they can't die from fall damage, they'll just look down and walk away), or hot something to melt some ice obstacles, and fish to make penguins go in its direction. There are also a few ice structures, like a slope, stairs or floating platforms, most of them can only placed in specific places. My biggest issue with the Lemmings-style levels is how slow they are. I get it, penguins aren't very quick and nimble, the problem is a combination of the birds' speed and the levels themselves being long. They usually take about 8-10 minutes to complete, but you don't want penguins to fall offscreen, or they'll start from the beginning and slowly start waddling towards the finish line. That's pretty much a level reset, and it can be so frustrating. And if I had built the way forward, I had to wait for the penguins to reach the destination. I would just whip out my 3DS and play something on there while waiting. Riveting gameplay, folks. Oh, and a cherry on top is the game’s poor performance. It slows down fairly frequently for seemingly no reason. That’s just poor optimization IMO. There are more minor deficiencies as well. The icy slope can be turned left or right, but someone had a bright idea of making it depend on the direction in which you’re moving the object. Precision placement is difficult when you have to alternate between left and right. It wouldn’t have been too difficult to make it turn by pressing A button instead. You can scroll the screen by either moving the cursor to the right or the left edge of the screen, or pressing L or R. However, if you hold any other button after letting go of the shoulder button, the screen will continue to scroll. There are more unpolished moments. There were occasions where penguins got stuck in one place for no reason. They just kept looking down even though they weren’t at the edge. Well, a few times they were but still. Tempting them with fish usually solved this. Also, if too many sounds effects play at once, the sound bugs out.

Besides being Lemmings, the game alternates playstyles every other level. And I’m sarcastically happy to report that they’re just as bad. There are top-down labyrinth segments. Y’know that ice gimmick in RPGs like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban GBA, or old Pokemon games, where you hit ice and continue moving until you hit something. Well, it’s a thing™️ in this game too. And it’s no fun. You navigate between piles of snow to find your mate, and there are ice corners that turn you around. There are occasional brown-ish snowflakes that’ll guide you on the correct path and give a little bit of extra time. The problem is that sometimes, you can’t even see obstacles ahead thanks to the unhelpful camera, which only scrolls when you’re close to the edge, which means you aren’t given adequate view. So there are occasional trial and error moments when you’re trying to figure out the way forward. And if you fall into an ice crack, you’ll start from the very beginning. It’s slow, it’s tedious and it all looks the same. There’s also one level where you have to keep an egg while moving through the crowd of penguins, using the same top-down perspective. You move constantly, so you have to awkwardly alternate moving forward and backward so you don’t bump into someone. There are a few penguins which move who make it harder. If you bump into something or someone, you’ll get knockback and the egg will roll somewhere. You lose 2 seconds instead of 1 if you lose it, so you have to go fetch it, but there are times where it can get into an unfavorable position and you’ll keep getting knocked into submission. And these moving penguins can blend into the background penguins, since they all look the same, for a nasty surprise. Lastly, there are a couple swimming sections, the most tolerable sections. They’re set in 2D perspective, you have to find and eat some fish and watch out for oxygen, move up to the surface. You can dash, but while dashing you can’t just move straight up/down. The hitboxes are occasionally janky. Otherwise, I don’t have much to complain, but I wouldn’t call these sections that fun.

Overall, March of the Penguins is a pretty bad time. The music is generic piano tunes, the graphics are mediocre and the gameplay is boring and tedious, the game is lacking in polish and there are no redeeming qualities. I’m sure watching the documentary this is based on would prove more entertaining than playing this cheap cash grab. This game is not worth a play.

I'm not sure what else I was expecting when I randomly decided to play a GBA game based on the National Geographic feature-length documentary March of the Penguins as narrated by Morgan Freeman.

It's just a crappy version of Lemmings. Like yeah, that makes sense? I guess I was hoping they'd go full bollocks on it, and make it a 2D platformer where you play as Mama Penguin who's out to save her kid from another dastardly mustache-twirling penguin. I think there's some decent mechanics there for a penguin-based platformer involving sliding and fast-paced swimming, perhaps you could also spit fish at enemies as a form of limited ammunition? The enemies could be leopard seals, orca whales and club-wielding poachers, the typical stuff.

Game just feels like the polar (heh) opposite of Attack of the Mutant Penguins, just very boring and zero creativity. Still funny in itself that they made games based on the documentary. Penguin mania was just runnin' wild back in the 00s I guess.