You see it's truu-uu-uue, I wanna be like youu-uuu-uu, I wanna walk like you, talk like you...Get the song out of your head right now, because it's not here.

The Jungle Book is a children's game that blends elements of an RPG game with puzzles. The RPG requirements are satisfied by a very simplistic collection system of picking up fruits, statuettes and on the easy adventure level, collecting animal friends. The puzzles are activated by finding animal friends on the harder adventure level which automatically triggers a sliding tile puzzle, which increases with difficulty as the game progresses.

There are two modes of play: Adventure and Puzzle. Adventure mode has players searching the various levels for fruits which increase health, powerups which help with the puzzles, and statuettes that garner movie clips for later viewing. Puzzle mode offers players the chance to play the puzzles without having to solve the adventure levels. Adventure mode offers six levels of play, each with several areas to explore. Puzzle mode offers ninety puzzles in the easy mode, and one hundred seventeen in the normal mode. That's a lot of puzzles.

As this game is aimed directly toward young kids, the gameplay is very easy, even in the Normal difficulty mode (two difficulties are offered, easy and normal). The fruits and other items are extremely easy to find, and wandering around is kept to a minimum. Mowgli's only action is running and pushing rocks out of the way, so no complicated button movements are required. Gameplay basically consists of Mowgli running around different environments like the savannah and jungle finding the various fruits, animals and statues, and now and then playing a puzzle game.

"Where's the music?" is a burning question in my mind. The songs from the movie are NOT featured here, which is a shame. It seems odd that Disney would grant the rights for the movie, but not the music?!? The tune that is played is adequate and attempts to capture the spirit of the movie, but face it, we wanna hear the original songs!

The locales and characters are drawn nicely, and the colors are bright and pleasant, but the visuals aren't state of the art by any means. However, the movie clips that are shown between the levels, plus the ones that are earned, are outstanding! We really enjoyed watching them, the movement is fluid and looks exactly like the cartoon.

As a parent, I'm always appreciative of games that cater to the little guys. UbiSoft has done a good job of keeping everything simple and non-frustrating, except for the afflicted password system, which offers a long stream of letters and symbols with upper and lower case letters. As many players will just be learning to print legibly, this is unnecessarily complicated. However, even simple, easy games need to offer something to do besides just walking through the fruit to get it. Some jumping around would have livened things up a bit. Also, there really should have been more than just one puzzle type, the sliding puzzle. I admit to having a personal bias against sliding puzzles, from bad encounters in various adventure games, but still, some variety is nice even when offered a favorite type of puzzle. A few memory games and even some simple critical thinking games would have been nice to toss into the mix. I'm not advocating making it more difficult, just more interesting.

All in all, a decent game for very young players, but one that may bore even the most unexacting child after a few hours.

Graphics: 7 
Nice, pleasant graphics, but nothing exciting. However, the movie clips are great!

Sound: 5
We want the original soundtrack! The provided background music is decent, but nothing really finger-popping catchy.

Concept: 6 
A children's game based on a children's movie.

Overall: 6
UbiSoft has done a good job designing a simple kids' game that the young children can play without frustration. The fun factor needs to be increased, though.