Everyone knows the movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, a movie that was found average by many movie lovers and critics. Unfortunately, this game performs even worse. Buena Vista Games, Disney's game studio, is to blame this time. Although they managed to come up with decent games in the past (think Kingdom Hearts), they weren't capable of equalling their previous level.

You can't say the people at BVG didn't try. They've added 3 minigames starting off with Shoot The Monkey where you need to shoot Jack the monkey and not the crew seeing that will cost you points. Then there's Walk The Plank where you play a game of Simon Says (you know, you need to push colors in the correct order) and last but not least there's Boom Barge where you need to shoot on boxes that are laying in the water with your cannon to make them collide with an enemy ship. Who manages to hit the opposition three times win. All these minigames use the touch screen which makes them quite amusing.

The game itself on the other hand is a lot less fun. It's a typical hack&slash without any variation. There's three characters to play with, Will Turner, Jack Sparrow and Miss Swann, but they all fight in the same way. The only difference is a "signature move" which can be activated by pressing the two shoulder buttons and they're most handy for when you're surrounded and need some breathing space. Unfortunately these special moves can only be used a couple of times each level and it does happen that you run into A LOT of trouble. For the rest you have to continuously slash the same opponents (cannibals, pirates or British soldiers) over and over again... In a matter of speaking you can say that you could finish the game with only using 2 buttons. All this boring stuff in combination with the bad possibilities for movement make the game very irritating. I won't say this is the worst control system I've ever seen, but it's very close.

With all this irritation I would almost forget that there are still some things in the game that might make it worth trying out. You can unlock concept arts, weapons, costumes and combos by earning money and buying them, or by progressing in the game. These weapons go up to the strangest things, from umbrellas to frying pans. And of course the more serious stuff like swords and hand guns are also present.

The game can also be played in co-op but it's multi-card play (every player needs his copy of Dead Man's Chest). This doesn't make the game much more interesting as you'll just replay the singleplayer mission without any real improvements.

Also the graphics could use improvement. There are often textures that show an ENORMOUS amount of blocks and on top of that you get to see black lines of about a millimeter in the background where textures should come together. Also the sound isn't quite what it should be, it often flirts with the border between average and plain bad seeing that it really sounds a bit too much compressed. The DS can do a lot better than what this game shows.