The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe demo for Windows

The movie marketers at Disney definitely have a cinematic role model. We haven't seen the movie yet, but the style of the tie-in game looks a lot like another popular fantasy film series from recent years--The Lord of the Rings. That decision pushes the adventure game toward fighting and bloodshed, which seems quite different from that fabulous children's book we remember from so long ago. Before the demo is over, you'll become very well versed with Peter's swashbuckling abilities, if not sick to death of hacking wolves, goblins, and minoboars. The graphics look very good and the combination of character attacks is an interesting twist, but repetitive gameplay, lack of in-game help, and abrupt ends to each level prevent the demo from earning a top rating.

The demo offers two levels from the full game, plus a trailer that blends cinematic and gameplay elements. In the first mission, you control Peter, Susan, and Lucy as they chase the White Witch and a kidnapped Edmund down an icy river, while wolves, dwarves, boulder-launching birds, goblins, and Cyclopes try to stop them. In the second, Peter and Edmund must escape from a massive minoboar army. With conventional directional controls and four attack buttons, the game clearly was developed for consoles, and a dedicated game controller works best. All the characters have two attacks--strong and weak--and all combine with one another for six cooperative moves. None of this information is included in the actual demo, however, so we highly advise perusing the read-me file first to learn basic gameplay. Despite the 183MB file size, the actual demo is a standalone executable, so it installs and uninstalls very quickly and easily.