It looks like the makers of this game ran out of time and published the game half finished
The graphics are nice, considering it's a low-budget kids game. You shouldn't need a gaming computer for a game of this type. The animations are stiff and puppet-like, except for the dancing animations which are OK.
The controls are absolutely horrible and are as far from intuitive as possible. Pressing the forward button is not always forward. It seems the controls are in relation to the camera, not the character. So before running forward check which way the camera is pointing. It took me (a game designer) a while to get used to these awkward controls and my daughter is still having trouble. It is very annoying when positioning the character before making a jump and having to edge forward only to have the character turn left or right instead of stepping forward.
I don't know why the makers of this game didn't use the mouse to control the character. The mouse is used in some of the activities, but not for the character control. In my experience, kids grasp the mouse concept better than using combo keys on the keyboard (two arrow keys at the same time, for example). Pressing a forward button and steering with the mouse is easier.
Another drawback of the game are the gems. Throughout the game the princess can collect gems. There is absolutely no point in collecting them. There is no score, nor do the do anything if you get enough. But, if you don't get them soon enough, the Brutus the monkey will come along and take them. My daughter was upset that she wasn't able to get to the gems before the monkey took them. She wasn't able to get them because of the bad controls and sometimes because it is physically not possible to get to them before the monkey comes. Now she simply ignores the gems because there's no reason to try for them. Nice lesson.
After finding a princess, you get to design a dance by selecting from many dance steps. After choosing six steps, you can view your dance in full. However, if you disabled background music in the options menu, the princess dances without sound. I recommend that you leave on the music for this reason, and also because it partially covers up the annoying bird commentary. By the way, in the movie, the bird's name was Felix. In the game the bird is called Scooch. Maybe they couldn't find anyone to sound like Felix so they made a new talking bird. Just how many talking birds are we to believe Derek owns?
