Video Game / Over the Hedge

The Video Game adaptation of the DreamWorks Animation film Over the Hedge, developed by Edge of Reality and published by Activision in 2006 for the Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox.

Unlike most video games based on movies, this one starts at the climax of the film, with RJ having his change of heart and the animals defeating Gladys, Vincent, and Dwayne, leaving the forest animals free to do as they please.

Afterwards, the game jumps forward in time to one year later, when raiding people's houses for food and other things has become routine for the Hedgies. One day, however, they come home to find all their food has been stolen and their stuff broken. As it turns out, Dwayne the Verminator, known to the animals as "The Sniffer", has returned with an army of brainwashed animals, all of which are controlled using mind control caps that he has invented. From this point on, the game sees the Hedgies resume stealing food from the humans as well as a variety of other devices, including a laptop, a film projector, a popcorn machine, a cotton candy machine, and even a satellite dish from Vincent's cave, among other things.

Playable characters include RJ, Verne, Hammy, and Stella. While playing, you can use weapons such as golf clubs, plungers, baseball bats, etc. to fight enemies. You can also throw long range weapons, such as frisbees or boomerangs. There are various toy guns thrown about the game as well, like a ball launcher.

As a side note, versions for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS were also made, though these were different from the console versions and revolved around the events of the movie and the animals trying to get endangered species to move into the area to prevent it from being destroyed, respectively. The latter also introduced Dwayne's brother, Henri, who is a taxidermist.

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This game provides examples of the following Tropes:

• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: One of the levels sees player characters end up in one of these.
• Action Girl: Stella is the only female playable character.
• Actionized Sequel: The game is much more focused on action than the movie. The movie was primarily focused on comedy with a handful of action scenes, while the game's plot involves the heroes battling an invasion of mind-controlled animals.
• Adaptational Badass: RJ, Verne, Hammy and Stella all go from non-combatants in the movie to weapon-wielding badasses capable of taking down hundreds of mind-controlled animals.
• Adaptational Dumbass: Hammy was originally more unfocused than stupid in the film. Here, he doesn't even know if three comes after six.
• Adaptational Heroism: Unlike in the movie where he stayed villainous, Vincent the bear undergoes a Heel–Face Turn and becomes a trusted ally to the woodland creatures.
• Adaptational Wimp: The Depelter Turbo. The movie version was hilariously powerful, while this one can be defeated by a few special attacks to its fuel source. It still puts up a good fight to protect its tanks, though.
• Advancing Boss of Doom: The rottweiler. Unlike Nugent, the one from the movie, this one's an Angry Guard Dog who explicitly wants to eat the woodland animals. He also seems to be Ax-Crazy, based upon his dialogue while he chases them.
• Airborne Mook: The flying barbecue ovens, which attack by dropping hot coals.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: At the start of the game, the gang returns to find their home destroyed by an attack by Dwayne's animal minions. It happens again towards the end during a level in which the Woods are attacked by more mind-controlled animals. Fortunately, the gang is able to repel them.
• And the Adventure Continues: The ending has RJ and Verne slipping through the hedge to set off on another heist.
• Angrish: When confronting the critters, Mr. Ropeley has a tendency to burst into vaguely intelligible gibberish.
• Animal Stereotypes: The ones used in the movie return, there's now an angry rottweiler who is explicitly bad unlike Nugent, and the enemies fit this pretty well.
• Anti-Frustration Features: For certain objectives such as avoiding security cameras and motion sensors, even if the computer-controlled partner runs into them, as long as the player themselves didn't touch them, they'll be counted as complete.
• Artificial Stupidity: The teammate AI is decent at fighting enemies and knows how to avoid traps. What it's not good at is multitasking. When enemies and traps show up in the same place, things tend to get ugly as the AI teammate tries to fight enemies inside a motion detector or blunders into a laser grid, losing a ton of health in the process. It's also not good at keeping up with you; while the player might have no trouble progressing through a level quickly, the AI gets very sloppy when trying to match your pace.
• Ax-Crazy:
  • Mr. Ropeley, the theme park owner, who hates the critters a bit too much to be anything else. His boss fight has him burning down an in-construction roller coaster trying to trying to kill them.
  • There's also his rottweiler guard dog, who shouts angry threats in a crazed way as he chases the animals.
  Rottweiler: HOLD STILL SO I CAN EAT'CHA! WHERE'S YOUR MANNERS? WERE YOU RAISED IN A BARN?
  • Dwayne's mind-controlled animals scheme certainly comes off as a bit more unhinged than anything he did in the movie.
• Bad Ol' Badger: The first type of Elite Mook encountered is a mind-controlled badger.
• Bears Are Bad News: Mind controlled bear cubs are the toughest mooks you face. Vincent returns as a boss as well, since he's an adult and therefore far tougher, though for this fight he himself is mind controlled.
• Beary Friendly: Vincent, after his Heel–Face Turn. He's accepted easily by the porcupine kids; everyone else is rightfully still afraid of him. Luckily, he's pretty chill afterwards.
  RJ: Aww, he's just like a giant teddy bear. With anger issues. And half eaten bats on his breath.
• Beat the Curse Out of Him: A more mundane variety where defeating enemies entails knocking the mind-control caps off their heads. And likely beating them senseless in the process.
• Big Bad: Dwayne takes the spot of main antagonist in this game, as the post-time skip story is kick-started by him ransacking the Woods. His mind-controlled animals and various machines also serve as the primary enemies in the game, and he himself takes center stage later on.
• Boss in Mook's Clothing: The armadillos. You can only hurt them once they stop being curled up, but since that's their method of attacking you... Not to mention they're only encountered in one of the Vincent's Cave levels as well as the level where the Woods is attacked.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Most of the enemies are this due to Dwayne's mind control.
• Bridal Carry: RJ carries Heather this way when the group escapes VermTech near the end of the game.
• Broken Echo: While exploring Vincent's cave, Verne shouts out "Reptile". His echo comes back as "Amphibian", keeping with his Insistent Terminology gag in the film.
• Car Fu:
  • One of the minigames has RJ, Verne, Hammy, Stella, Gladys, and Dwayne battling in golf cart bumper cars.
  • One level has you fight the Verminator Van from atop a golf cart driven by Ozzie.
• Cartoon Cheese: One of the gadgets in the handheld game is stinky cheese. It briefly stuns both humans and pets.
• Canon Foreigner: All versions of the game have plenty, including Rufus the blue jay (though he may be based on a character from the original comic strip instead).
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Tiger, despite having moved into the forest with Stella at the end of the movie, is nowhere to be found in the game. Until the final cutscene, anyway.
• Circling Birdies: The "circling stars" variant appears around the heads of defeated player characters or mooks.
• Cores-and-Turrets Boss: Dwayne. The objective of the fight is to break the central computer hooked up to all the mind-control helmets while Dwayne and a bunch of Mecha-Mooks shoot at you.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: The first level has a cutscene that introduces lasers by having RJ swipe at one with his golf club, setting it off and causing it to fire at a nearby object. Try that yourself and you'll just get shot for your efforts.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Vincent takes a lot of damage before he goes down.
• Damsel in Distress: Heather gets captured by Dwayne near the end of the game, and the last two areas' missions revolve around saving her.
• Dance Party Ending: The console game ends with the woodland critters throwing a dance party to celebrate the Verminator's defeat.
• Deadly Lunge: Badgers' main attack is to lunge at you from a long distance away, even from offscreen. It does quite a bit of damage and has high knockback; take note of any nearby ledges when fighting one.
• Deadpan Snarker: Verne gets a lot of this as a playable character:
  (whenever Ozzy "plays dead" during an Escort Mission) I guess the snoring is part of the act.
• Demoted to Extra: Gladys was a major antagonist in the movie, but in the game's story, she only factors into the plot during the pre-time skip levels (which take place during the movie's climax) and for one section near the end.
• Deus Exit Machina: Vincent, being a bear, can easily flatten those badgers who give you trouble. So for most of the "Defend the Woods!" level, he's in a corner fighting off an endless wave of rats. However, there's nothing stopping you from luring enemies over to Vincent and having him dispose of them for you.
• Developer's Foresight: Each of the four playable characters have their own dialogue for almost every single level, and they have different lines depending on which player slot they're in. There are hundreds of different lines for each character and level, and it's worth playing the same level with different teams just to hear them all. There's even a hint about it given upon completing the game.
  Play levels with different characters, and they will say different things!
• Didn't Think This Through: At one point, Ozzie, apparently so determined to show how good he is at faking his death, walks into oncoming traffic. Amazingly, he survives, but the wagonload of goods is scattered across a nearby yard, forcing the other animals to gather it all up.
• Dogs Are Dumb: The angry rottweiler who chases the hedgies is defeated after being tricked into running into a wooden gate.
• Double Jump: All playable characters can do this, and the aerial attack doubles as a third jump. On the enemies' side, rabbits can also do this in an attempt to Goomba Stomp you.
• Downer Beginning: The game's story properly begins when the hedgies return from a heist to find the woods ransacked by Vermtech, who stole all of their food and broke their television.
• Easter Egg: Hammy's ranged attack has him throwing a boomerang. If you throw one off into the distance and stand there, it'll fly back and smack him in the head (for no damage).
• Enemy Mine: Verne convinces Vincent to join the gang by pointing out their common enemy: Dwayne. Funnily enough, Vincent thinks he's talking about RJ at first, and Verne clarifies with "the other common enemy".
• Escort Mission: Several levels involve guarding Ozzie and the wagon from waves of enemies, and Ozzie will just play dead until they're gone, leaving it up to you to prevent your food from being destroyed.
• Expressive Health Bar: At full to half health, your character's portrait has a neutral expression. When reduced to a quarter of their health, they become visibly tired. If defeated, the portrait has them knocked out while stars spin around their head.
• Family-Friendly Firearms: There are four kinds of guns. Respectively, they shoot ping-pong balls, ice, fire, and gas bubbles. In the final boss fight, Dwayne dual wields guns that fire the former three.
• Fartillery: Stella uses her stink in her moveset: she farts for her Double Jump (though this is only a visual effect and doesn't actually do anything) and her powerful attack involves her gassing the area around her.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: When playing the golf cart minigame, Gladys and Dwayne are opponents.
• Godzilla Threshold: For most of the game post-Time Skip, the animals try to stay away from Gladys as to avoid her wrath. However, when Heather gets kidnapped by the Verminator, the animals have no choice but to steal Gladys' blackberry phone to find out where VermTech is located.
• The Goomba: Rats are the weakest and most numerous enemies in the game, with no abilities other than a basic melee swing. They're also the only enemies encountered in the initial pre-Time Skip levels.
• Goomba Stomp: Rabbits attack by leaping into the air and trying to land on players.
• Gratuitous French: Henri the Taxidermist from the handheld game likes using this, complete with insisting that his name is to be pronounced the French way. According to Dwayne it's because he went to art college.
• Ground Pound: Every character has access to one as a special attack. So does Vincent.
• Guide Damn It!: Some of the secondary objectives are this, like "Save the bunny", which requires you to shoot the decoration on top of Dwayne's truck whenever it appears.
• Heel–Face Turn: You have to battle Vincent again, but he's wearing a mind control helmet. Once you get it off of him, he joins you, comes back to the hedge and helps you fight the brainwashed animals attacking the Woods. It sticks even after the Exterminator is defeated, with Vincent continuing to stay at the hedge during the Playable Epilogue.
• Heart Container: Picking up 20 cans of Spuddies permanently increases your maximum health. Getting 20 boxes of cookies does the same for your Limit Break meter.
• Hour of Power: Picking up a new melee weapon instantly maxes out your super meter and gives you unlimited supers for a brief time.
• Hub Level: The Woods, which evolves whenever a new item is obtained during a heist.
• Hub Under Attack: The Woods get attacked by an army of mind-controlled animals near the end of the game. Fortunately, the animals manage to repel the army with the help of Vincent.
• Human Ladder: If one character jumps on the other, they'll form a tower until the top character jumps off or they get hit by an attack. While in a tower, the two characters can rapidly attack at the same time to deal extra damage or perform a powerful Spin Attack for as long as both characters have super meter.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Eating chips and pizza will instantly heal characters. Likewise, candies and energy drinks will fill your super meter.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: The gang has an unlimited supply of golf balls, pucks, boomerangs, and frisbees to hit/throw at enemies.
• Hypocritical Heartwarming: RJ's response to Ozzie getting attacked by rats in the Night Streets level:
  RJ: No one but me hassles my friends!
• Improvised Armour: Various hats are scattered throughout the levels and can be picked up and worn to give a slight health bonus.
• Improvised Weapon: Pretty much every weapon wielded by any character counts. RJ sports a golf club, Verne uses a hockey stick, Stella wields a plunger, and Hammy goes with a stick. On the mook side, rats in particular wield a wide variety of bludgeoning tools, from rolling pins to wrenches to the occasional toothbrush.
• King Mook: Three of the bosses are a King Rat, a King Bunny, and a King Gopher. Vincent may also qualify as one for the bear cub enemies, as would the Depelter Turbo for the Mecha-Mooks.
• Laser Hallway: It's not uncommon to see a crisscrossing grid of lasers hooked up to traps protecting backyards. And in at least one house, there are lasers in the dining room. There's only one actual hallway with lasers in it, though.
• Limit Break: Each character has a special attack powered by a meter that's charged by collecting candies and energy drinks, and is activated by holding down a button. All are functionally the same, but the animation is different for each playable character.
  • RJ does a spin attack with his golf club.
  • Verne's shell starts orbiting around him.
  • Hammy runs around in a circle at lightning speed.
  • Stella just gasses the area around her.
  • If one characters is stacked on the other, the special attack becomes a whirling tornado move.
• Malaproper: Hammy mispronounces "endangered" as "engendered" near the beginning of the handheld game.
• Mecha-Mooks: Robots appear quite frequently as enemies, often disguised as mundane objects like shrubs and barrels before they sprout deadly spinning blades and attack you, begin pelting you with ping-pong balls, drop coals from above, or spew out enemies.
• Medium Awareness: One of RJ's comments during the Vincent boss fight has him complaining that Vincent wasn't even meant to be there and demanding a script rewrite.
  RJ: Hey, you weren't supposed to be here! I demand a rewrite!
• Mind-Control Device: Dwayne uses these on animals like rats.
• Mistaken for Granite: Most mechanical enemies will start out disguised as innocuous objects like barrels, bushes, and rocks, before activating when players approach.
• Non-Lethal K.O.: If a player character loses all their health, they are knocked out and will get back up with a small amount of health shortly after; if the other player is knocked out before this happens, you'll have to restart. The other player can also smack them awake, which restores more health than letting them get up on their own.
• Noodle Incident:
  • After being defeated, the Rat King says "And that was the twelfth time I caught rabies."
  • According to RJ if he's the point character in Mountain Paths, he made a bet with Vincent over a section of the latter's cave being known as "squashed fool pass". Vincent won the bet.
  • In Stella's dialogue for the Connors' House heist for the cutscene introducing the sleeping gas sprayers, Stella mentions that she fell into some raw sewage that Hammy had brought back.
  • During the heist of Gladys' new house, Verne mentions a time when Hammy blew up a box factory for St. Patrick's Day.
• Offscreen Teleportation: All the Escort Missions that involve protecting Ozzie and the wagon from waves of enemies have a section where the gang is distracted by something, only for Ozzie to have somehow gotten incredibly far ahead with no logical reason. He even manages to get trapped in a yard filled with lasers despite the gate being locked. Naturally, this is Played for Laughs and repeatedly Lampshaded.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: Gun-wielding rats tend to be positioned in all kinds of inconvenient locations to shoot at you, but they'll go down in a single hit from anything.
• Painfully Slow Projectile: A gun that shoots exploding bubbles is available as a weapon. Its projectiles move about as quickly as you'd expect from a bubble in still air.
• Playable Epilogue: After defeating the exterminator, you can hang around the woods once again to get some bonus conversations: the porcupine family and Vincent watch Madagascar while Ozzie and Heather have a heart-to-heart regarding Heather's rescue from Verm-Tech. Each of the four playable characters also gets epilogue-exclusive dialogue when switching to them.
• Power-Up Food: Nacho chips and pizza restore health, candies and energy drinks power the Limit Break meter, and Spuddies cans and cookie boxes permanently increase the health and super meters respectively once you collect enough of them.
• Precision-Guided Boomerang: Hammy's ranged attack is a boomerang. If you don't throw it at a specific target and wait a bit, it flies back and hits him in the face.
• Product Placement: Once the animals obtain the projector, clips of Shrek SuperSlam, Shark Tale, and Madagascar can be seen in the forest over the course of the game.
• Required Party Member: The first four levels, being directly based on the movie, require you to use specific characters: the first two require RJ and Verne, the third requires Hammy and Stella, and the fourth requires Verne and Hammy. In every level afterwards, you can use any combination of the four as you see fit.
• Rewarding Vandalism: Oh my, yes. Most missions have dozens upon dozens of breakable objects, and considering how frequently they drop pickups, it's in your best interest to break every single one.
• Sanity Slippage:
  • Dwayne, are mind control helmets on animals really necessary to capture the ones you're after?
  • The Theme Park Owner, who breaks out fireworks and a roller coaster death trap to kill a few animals who stole a popcorn machine and a cotton candy machine.
• Shout-Out:
  • Before his boss fight, the Rat King taunts the hedgies with "Animals, come out and play!"
  • The hat found in the bear-filled Cave Interiors is none other than a firefighter's helmet, referencing Smokey the Bear.
• Shows Damage: The golf carts in the Bumper Carts minigame visibly become damaged as their health drops, first losing their canopies and then starting to smoke.
• Spin Attack: All of the Limit Breaks involve the character either performing a powerful spinning attack (RJ, Verne, and any two characters stacked on top of each other) or running around in circles (Hammy). Stella is the only exception, as her attack involves her simply gassing the area around her.
• The Smurfette Principle: Stella is the only playable female hedgie, with Heather and Penny being NPCs.
• Time Skip: There's one that occurs after the first four levels are completed, jumping forward in time to roughly a year after the end of the movie.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Seriously, what kind of exterminator places so many crazy traps around a neighborhood just to catch a bunch of animals? Also, what kind of exterminator would use an army of brainwashed animals for the same goals?
• Unique Enemy: Rats carry many different kinds of weapons, but only a single rat at the beginning uses a chicken drumstick.
• Warm-Up Boss: The Rat King, essentially a beefed-up version of the basic rats, is the first boss in the game, demonstrating Dwayne's mind-control caps that he devised after the Time Skip. He's also the first enemy with a gun weapon, serving to introduce that too.
• Whack-a-Monster: Gophers will tunnel away when low on health, forcing you to track them down. Fortunately, they only do this once. Moles, on the other hand, do this a lot, and they chuck bombs whenever they surface.
• Wicked Weasel: Weasels armed with tasers become common in the later levels. They attack by running at you from afar before backing off to recharge.
• World of Snark: While Verne is by far the biggest snarker in the cast, bring any two characters other than Hammy into a level and you'll probably end up with high-octane Snark-to-Snark Combat, and that's without taking into account the NPCs.
• You Dirty Rat!: Rats are by far the most common enemy in the game. Granted, they are under mind control, except the ones in the first levels before the timeskip.
• "You!" Exclamation: When the hedgies crash Dwayne's van into Gladys's house (just as Gladys muses about how she'll never have to deal with them again):
  Gladys: YOU!
  Dwayne: (coming to) THEM!
  Hammy: US!

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