Games based on movies have rarely scored highly amongst gamers, not least because of the strong (and usually justified) suspicion that they've been rush-released as a quick cash cow on the back of a successful film, with little attention to plot, graphics, gameplay and storyline.

Movie-based games in the fantasy genre have fared slightly better than most, thanks to half-decent versions of Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter spin-offs. The Spiderwick Chronicles is a sort of amalgam of Narnia and Harry Potter and is based on the books (and now movie) of the same name that followed the fortunes of three siblings - Jared, Simon and Mallory - who come to live in their great-great-uncle's mysterious mansion.

The house and the surrounding lands turn out to be populated by unseen beings such as fairies, elves, orcs and goblins and before long one of the boys discovers Arthur Spiderwick's Field Journal which has a strict warning against breaking the seal. Naturally the inevitable happens and soon the kids are up to their eyes in mayhem and danger.

You take it in turns to play as each of the three children, as well as occasionally Thimbletack the friendly Brownie (who's a bit like Harry Potter's elf friend Dobbie only uglier). The action involves performing a number of quests and side-quests - which frequently take the form of finding scattered objects and then assembling them - while fighting off hostile goblins and their ogre boss Mulgarath.

Each child uses different weapons, but Jared's are more fun as they range from a catapult through to a steel baseball bat. Extra moves can be unlocked as you gain more experience and defeat more goblins. One clever innovation is the use of a special net to capture fairies and sprites and you then have a time limit to do a ‘water colour' drawing of them in the Field Journal before they fly away. Once captured, they will then supply you with health and certain spells and magic powers to help in the fight against the bad guys.

If you don't know the film, there are plenty of cut scenes included in the game and the difficulty of the puzzles and quests for most of the time is almost embarrassingly easy for anyone aged over 13. There's also a structural mistake of having the boss fight as the penultimate chapter, leaving the final chapter to ‘mop up' all the side-quests you've ignored and sprites you haven't captured.

Although the main music score is engaging, the incidental music is often irritating in the extreme and there are problems with awkward camera angles, clipping and pathfinding. However, for youngsters maybe starting out on the adventure gaming path, they could do a lot worse than indulge in this light hearted fantasy questing.

As film spin-offs go, this whimsical slice of fantasy adventure stays close to the original while providing plenty of relatively untaxing missions and scores of goblins to clobber about the head.