The Spiderwick Chronicles takes the story from the movie and translates it into game form, but unless you are a younger gamer, you will find nothing more than an average movie to game cash grab.

The Spiderwick Chroinicles focuses on the three Grace children, Jared, Simon and Mallory.  They have moved to a new house out in the country that was owned by their Uncle, Arthur Spiderwick.  Not much is said about why they moved here, but it seemed to have something to do with the parents separating.  While staying at the house, the children, starting with Jared, are introduced to a new fantasy world that exists in their reality, invisible to those that do not have The Sight, or The Seeing Stone.  The only way to stop the creatures and save the world is to unlock the secrets of Arthur Spiderwick’s diary.

The game uses a fetch based quest system.  The puzzles are rather simple, employing the player to find one or several items to make something or gain access to a place.  None of the quests are overly hard and will never tax the player for a solution.  The quests will be based on the skills of the player.  Jarod uses more physical attacks, via a bat and slingshot.  Simon is a braniac that will use items to create weapons, like a squirt gun that can poison the bad guys.  Mallory is an expert swordswoman that puts her into situations where dueling will be required.

Enemies are rather generic and never seem to have any challenge to them.  Normally, they come straight at you and use simple attacks.  A lot of times, you will be swarmed, which makes combat more frustrating, than difficult.  A couple of enemies will employ you to escape them or use some sort of mechanism to get past them, i.e. luring other bad guys to them, or escaping them via a chase sequence.  None of these really do much to add to the experience, and tend to get tedious at times, due to the endless spawning of enemies to an area.

The graphics are decent and serviceable, but do not tax the system in anyway.  You never see the power of the 360 being used.   Characters never seem to have any life or expression to them in any way.  Backgrounds are mostly static and never have any sense of immersion.   Voice work is equally horrendous, making you want to find anything else to listen to over listening to the dialog.  There is no sense of emotion of care in the characters.  Not sure if anyone from the movie did the voice work for the game, but if they did, it is a total phone in.

One mechanic that is pretty cool is capturing fairies.  Fairies give you special powers, but you have to capture them with a net and paint their picture to unlock the power.  To paint the fairies, you run the cursor over a canvas, revealing the fairy in question.  You only have so much time to uncover the fairy, so you have to be quick, but accurate.  It is fun and makes you work to find the best way to reveal the picture of the fairy.  The only drawback is that there are only about nine or ten fairy types, so you start to know the patterns after a short time.

The game suffers from a dilemma, in that it is directed at children, but it may be difficult for some of them to complete the puzzles.  Adults will quickly tire from the tedious nature of the game, and the voice work will make them stop playing all together.  It is not a bad game, but it is just uninspired outside of the fairy painting sequences.  It does not help that the movie did not succeed at the movie theaters.  Sad thing is that this was the last hurrah of Stormfront Studios, which is not the way you would want to go out.

While the game offers some fun, The Spiderwick Chronicles is more of the same, a quick money grab on an average at best movie license.  Rent it for the achievements if you are desperate for points, but otherwise, I would avoid the game.  The Spiderwick Chronicles gets 2 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.