Hannah Montana: The Movie

Release date: Out Now

Formats: PC, PS3, XBOX 360

Price: £23.99

UK, June 26^th 2009 – God, I love power. It gives me a fat, densely-veined horn. I would piss all over my grandmother if she saluted me in return.

If you’ve ever wanted to hear these words spoken by Hannah Montana, you should buy this game immediately.

Let’s start with a little History. The first American towns were remote islands in a vast sea of wheat, held together by the oppression of their Puritan faith. The Community was all; neighbour told tale on neighbour, and all backs were bowed under the crushing weight of Dogma. With the modern age came the veneer of civilisation, but under the surface of every provincial American town lurks the spectre of fundamentalism; the seed of something great, and dark, and ugly.

This time, the seed has found fruitful soil and grown. It has grown into Hannah Montana.

Child’s Play

In this inspirational kids’ game, based on the 2009 movie by Darren Aronofsky, you play a young and dead-eyed religious fanatic whose dream is to rise from simple Southern schoolgirl to the religious Messiah of her entire town. Along the way you’ll learn important lessons about friends, responsibility, and practical mass suicide techniques.

So come on come on / Point out the unbeliever / Reveal his sin unto the Lord / And let him be purified by fire this day

HM: TM plays like Grand Theft Auto crossed with The Waltons. As you roam, sandbox-style, around your small town (controlled via a sometimes clunky third-person camera), your job is to win over the other inhabitants to your faith with fun song-and-dance routines, coupled with physical violence and the threat of eternal damnation.

Each follower brings revenue, and greater numbers allow you to hire out successively larger venues for your performances. You’ll go from Lord-themed disco all the way up to football stadium, and then who knows… maybe you’ll even take your fans to Heaven itself.

Montana paces her home, deep in thought. Her step-parents have been instructed never to look her in the face.

You Know… For Kids

Although the game features scenes of religious hatred on a huge scale, the designers are ever aware that it’s aimed at a younger audience. For this reason, God is represented by an alpaca.

Father Alpaca, benevolent Lord… and regretful Punisher.

Father Alpaca is also your in-game guide, giving you mission objectives and letting you know when you’re falling short of His Holy Ideal.

Father Alpaca looks on. “Why must I be so hard on myself”, Hannah asks of him. “Because you are dirty, child; dirty in the eyes of the Alpaca.”

This Little Piggy Runs A Book Shop

God is always guiding Hannah, using visions to show her the true way to righteousness. In the game, this is done via the AlpacaCam. It acts as an extra vision mode, activated by the Q key (PC), which allows you to see people the way Montana sees them: as ignorant animals who must be herded… or eaten.

Annie the Grocer is an emu because she hides her head in the sand; she will be easy to control. Her husband Elmore is a pig. He is a man, and filthy, and good only for the slaughter.

This mechanic is a magical way to show children how to break other people down into simple, easily definable stereotypes. That way, they will know whose arguments to ignore in real life.

When persuading new followers, you must select the most appropriate brainwashing method depending on what kind of animal they are. The AlpacaCam gives valuable clues here.

With A Little Help From My Cousins

Words are one thing, but before your commune can really take off, you also need to make sure you can maintain discipline. First, you must select your Cousins. These will be your closest followers and the harbingers of your will, ready to die – and kill – for you. This mechanic is vaguely similar to Black & White, in that you reward the Cousins for appropriate behaviour, and punish them for bad. Spend too little time refining their will to hurt, and they may get soft on you later, costing you valuable prestige, and even allowing usurpers to take your place.

“Show me how you’d do it, Caleb. Show me how you’d twist her head right off. You’re a good boy, Caleb.”

The best way to train your Cousins is to start them slow, on defenceless targets, such as women. Do it right, and no more than a few beatings will be necessary.

Montana takes her two new Cousins on a milk run. This time it’s just talking, but later in the game you can unlock blunt instruments, water boards and Medieval Inquisition relics in order to ensure maximum fealty.

This section of the game is maddeningly addictive, and I often found myself returning to the same victims because they were just so much fun to play through.

The errant emu has now been returned to the flock. If she knows what’s good for her, she will surrender a daily tithe of melons for the glory of the Alpaca.

Sometimes you actually get to control the Cousins directly, in a variety of fun torture-based mini-games which never get boring.

In “Baptism Pool”, you must hold dissenters’ heads under the water until they admit the Truth into their hearts. If a victim drowns, you lose points, and the frogs (your followers) laugh at you. Laughing, always laughing, just like the other kids in your class. Before you showed them.

A Staged Epiphany

But the main focus of the game is the concert. Dressed in a lurid blonde wig designed to appeal to the lowest Aryan denominator (there are no black people in the game, possibly to save on hard-drive space), your task is to lead your followers, or “Alpacolytes”, in song. Depending on your needs, you can choose a song that increases Fervour, leading to new followers, or Hate, useful when there are dissenters in your flock who must be weeded out.

Hateful lyrics are represented by the yellow button, Fervent ones by the blue. At higher detail settings, you can actually make out the froth collecting around your fans’ mouths as they chant your insipid drivel back at you.

“Without the shades and the hair / we are all babies, smooth and pure / so shave the heretic, strip him of clothes / and welcome him, screaming, born again /  from the womb of bloody suffering”

A skillful player will combine Hate and Fervour to create terrified fanatics completely immune to logic, but this takes patience to perfect. On Easy difficulty, you can speed up the process by burning down the town library.

Montana teaches her followers the ways of AlpacaBaiting, the confrontational techniques used to subdue enemies.

We’ve Created A Montana

Let’s forget gameplay for a minute: everyone knows that a game lives or dies purely on its story, and you’ll be glad to know that HM: TM has one of the best.

The game draws heavily on the movie’s dark themes, giving them a cute fluffy twist to delight young children. In a series of animated cut-scenes, you learn that Montana’s parents home-schooled her, using a self-made curriculum of Creationist pamphlets and regular beatings. Montana didn’t need their hugs, anyway; she had her stuffed animals, and she had The Lord. At her first Bible meeting, as Montana stood before the wide-eyed faces and sang ditties of Hellfire, she tasted power, and knew that it was sweet.

Without school to hold her back, the little girl grew up prodigiously fast, unfettered by the lies of literature and Liberalism. She was a prodigy. But she could never be good enough for her parents. Never never never. What did happen to them, anyway?

A secret door in Montanas’s apartment hides her Toys from view. In the boxes are the mummified remains of her parents, and various of their trinkets that Montana cries over when she is alone.

What I love most about the story is the sense of pathos for Montana herself. Underneath the frozen exterior, you are simply scared; scared of the weakness inside you. To overcome weakness, you know that it is necessary to make hard decisions. Sometimes those decisions will be unpopular, and people will not understand. Well, child, you must harden your heart. This is the will of the Alpaca; he has told you in your brain.

Montana rides out. Alone, she is vulnerable. It is a time to cry, and to rail at the inner voices that so jeer and mock. But you must bury your demons deep down. Dissolve their faces in quicklime if necessary.

Endgame

If Hannah cannot find peace, then surely no one else can. Not on this earth, anyway. Montana’s ultimate aim, therefore,  is the most glorious mass suicide the world has ever known. The Rapture. It requires 100,000 followers and a whole lotta nerve gas, so you should expect a good 20 hours of play before you’re ready to crack open the kegs and inhale the acrid scent of victory.

See how the audience cheer, but their faces are blank; soulless. They are now utterly within Montana’s thrall. You currently have 8750 followers and 4 canisters of nerve gas; not quite ready for the Rapture. Keep singin’!

I’ve played to the end, and let me tell you: seeing all those twitching bodies and knowing that you’re responsible is a wonderful feeling, and something that kids everywhere should share.

Multiplayer

There are two multiplayer modes. The first is Band Of Cousins, a Guitar Hero-style playathon in which you and three friends make up Hannah Montana’s backing band. Fail to keep up the Fervour levels, and the other players are given permission to set upon you with their instruments. This is particularly effective with The Wiimote, as each swing is accompanied by appropriate splats and crunches.

If all the Cousins screw up at once, Montana’s “plan” reveals itself in an in-engine cut-scene that frankly should have merited an 18+ rating.

The second and more ambitious multiplayer mode is Siege Of Alpacolyte Farm, an online team game for up to 32 players. One team is led by Hannah, the other by the SWAT leader sent to take her and her sick little coven down. But this is no Counterstrike. As the Alpacolytes, you must find a way to kill all of your own side before the SWAT team can capture anyone alive. You are given a strictly limited number of bullets; enough to fend off the SWATs, if you use them judiciously, but not enough to finish every one of your followers. You must be creative and quick-witted if you want to send them all to the Alpaca before the game is up.

Fire and physics are your friends here.

The SWAT team are just outside the barn. Everyone is indeed waiting in Heaven for the final few followers. But how will you get rid of them? Perhaps the cows can help…

Verdict

Hannah Montana: The Movie is not without its flaws. The Religious Education mini-games are fun, but nothing we haven’t seen in Postal 2, and it does get frustrating having to micro-manage every single beating; some kind of RTS-style automation would have helped here.

Nevertheless, HM:TM is a fun and inspiring story of what one young American is capable of if she puts her mind to it. I love the central message that no matter how stupid you are; no matter how backwards or ill-educated, the power is within you to change the world profoundly for the worse. And that’s a great feeling.

The blurb on the back of the box says it best, really:

“Imagine, if you will, a boot stamping upon a human face forever. Now imagine that you are doing the stamping, and that the boot is pink and covered with kittens.

Welcome, friend. Welcome to the world of Hannah Montana.”

“Let our voice come out from under / and our holy knives shine in the daylight / they will learn to fear us / oh yea, surely they will tremble before the end.”

DUBIOUS REVIEW SCORE: 82%

Filed under: Dubious Reviews