short and easy little licensed platformer. i played this to hell and back as a kid so i probably am blinded to some objective bad, but i had a lot of fun revisiting this and i think it manages to be well beyond good enough for what it is.

gameplay switches up frequently enough that i never got bored and the difficulty is so low that if i did get sick of a level i could have been done with it within a couple minutes.

visually functional. i mean, it’s pleasant enough to look at and that’s all you can ask in this context. and even being pretty generic, the music is hard sometimes. one of the tracks sounds like a midi of an early nine inch nails song for some reason, and another like it belongs on the vvvvvv ost.

PC/Home Console version is a pretty good game, but Madagascar GBA is (rather unsurprisingly) not great. It's a pretty mediocre 2D platformer. You can control 4 of the movie's main characters and switch between them, and each offers different abilities, and some abilities can be unlocked later in the game. After you beat a level, you can come back with all characters unlocked and all their abilities. Interestingly, this is exactly what Caddicarus mentioned you couldn't do in the Home Console/PC version of the game, but you can in this version. The platforming is pretty generic and there's not much variety. One issue is the camera, and how often I got ambushed by a hazard from offscreen, like a spider. Also the game doesn't allow you to pan the camera down to see what's below, which was fixed in Madagascar: Operation Penguin. There's also insta-kills in the form of water, only Gloria can swim, but I wish the game didn't kill you outright but placed you somewhere near and deducted a hit point. I got frustrated a few times because I landed in water that I didn't see as someone else. There are a couple stealth levels that aren't very good, because it's a lot of waiting. At least it features a nice zooming out effect that allows you to see further, I haven't seen any other game do that on GBA. And there are a couple mini-games, a dancing mini-game, that isn't a simple press a button when prompt enters an area thing, instead you have foosa on different platforms that correspond to a button or D-Pad direction, and when foosa jumps from that platform you press a corresponding button, so it's at least something more original, and the mini-game where you kick foosa on different platforms while the lemurs are getting rescued, pretty average. The graphics are pre-rendered once again, though certain things can blend with each other, like how I found metro area pretty distracting and how cacti hazards on the island didn’t stand out much against the scenery. Shin'en did the music, so I probably shouldn't tell you that the music is good. But I will. The music is good. Overall, I didn't enjoy this game that much. It's just kinda bland, though not totally offensive.

Also, this is the second game for the GBA that I know features loading screens, before cutscenes with movie stills, like Madagascar: Operation Penguin, though chronologically this is the first.