Death Jr.: Root of Evil

The root of evil is not money, it's not even the Grim Reaper himself. Nope, the root of evil is actually a malevolent plant with giant roots that is so powerful that even the Reaper has been ensnared by it. You are Devil Junior or DJ as your friends call you. It was you and your good friend, Pandora, who inadvertently unleashed the evil plant into the helpless world. Your mission is to undo the wrong that you have done and save your father - Mr. Reaper himself - from the evil vegetable. DJ looks like an undernourished teenager with a skull in place of a head and carries a pretty large scythe as a weapon. You use the Nunchak to move around and the Wii-mote to jump and attack. You can choose to play as Pandora too. This missy, who looks a little scary with eyes that have no whites, uses a whip instead of the scythe but otherwise their moves and attacks are almost identical. In the game, you move DJ around in a cutesy cartoonish setting, fighting monsters and solving puzzles to reach high ledges and open locked gates. Despite the cutesy look, I would not recommend this game to young kids as the music can be spooky and the characters a little weird. You start off learning to do a simple jump by pressing the A button but you soon learnt that by pressing it twice and holding, you can do a Hoover Jump which lets you go further. Your scythe is great for melee battles but you need to bring out the guns when the enemy shoots nasty stuff at you from afar. Here's when the fun begins. Press the Z key and you are put into a free-move mode where you can aim by simply moving your Wii-mote. Press B and fire away. You start with twin pistols but soon upgrade to uber cool weapons like a flaming toilet paper launcher, hamsters strapped with C4 explosives and even the icer which freezes enemies instantly. Pandora has slightly different weapons. They include the cute Shiny Sparkles which combine the "latest trashy pop music into a deadly vortex of bad tunes". As for melee attacks, you soon learn new gongfu moves which are executed by simply swinging the Wii-mote to the left, right, upwards and so on. While searching for the solution to free your skeletal Dad, you also have to complete your practical biology lessons together with your friends. They include Stigmartha (she actually likes school so she becomes an outcast), the Siamese twins Smith & Weston and a dead (yeah, dead) guppy. Root Of Evil is a fun game although it is a tad too short - I completed it in about eight hours.