The premise of this demo (and I assume the rest of the game) is pretty simple - attack the enemies that swarm you, working towards killing the boss while collecting various items along the way. You have a few basic attacks, which are different depending on who you play as (Homer and Bart are in the demo, Marge and Lisa will also be in the full game), and can also activate either Homer Ball or Bart Cape, each of which gives you more you can do. It’s pretty straightforward, and while the gameplay isn’t bad it isn’t anything amazing either. I could see it getting a bit repetitive, but the variety in levels in the full game will probably prevent that from happening.

The Lard Lad was especially annoying though and unnecessarily frustrating to beat, and hopefully not all the levels have bosses similar to him. The camera can be quite annoying too, and ends up getting in your way a lot more than it should. The graphics are just basic and cartoonish, although in places there were a lot of jaggies. Overall, the gameplay could definitely have been improved, but the other elements of the game will hopefully make up for it and the mediocre gameplay could just be because they picked a bad part of the game for the demo.

However, I doubt people are going to play The Simpsons Game mainly for the gameplay - it’s the humor, parody, and likeness to the show (and movie) that people will probably care most about.

Fortunately, it delivers on that front. There is a nearly constant play-by-play from the television host, and Homer and Bart (and even the clowns) spit out random lines of dialogue pretty frequently. There seems to be a huge amount of unique dialogue, because I hardly heard anything repeated and they kept saying new things even after I had been playing for a while. Plus, the cutscenes are incredible in high definition - everything looks so smooth and beautiful. Where the gameplay isn’t quite as good as I’d hoped, the rest makes up for it.

In conclusion: The gameplay isn’t horrible, but it isn’t that great either. The camera just gets in your way and taking out Lard Lad can be frustrating, but besides that there’s nothing bad that stands out especially. As long as the other levels in the game are somewhat different than this section it should be fine. The presentation is great though, with a lot of unique dialogue and slick cut scenes. It seems like it will be worth putting up with the few small faults for everything that’s done right.

So, what did you think of the demo? We’ve got a thread for it in the forums, so if you haven’t already make sure to head over there and post your opinion.

[It should be noted that I haven't actually seen that many episodes of The Simpsons. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, but think of the game as more of a separate entity instead of an extension of the show and movie. So while I enjoyed the humor and dialogue, my opinion could be quite different than that of a hard core fan.]