Ladies and gentleman, I give you a review of G-Force. And in fact, this is not just another “why the hell do you play this shit” game! Surprisingly, G-Force is by far the best licensed/movie game I have played in years. And that includes X-Men Origins: Wolverine...

G-Force awwww yeah!
To be honest, I had no clue what this movie was about other than that it involved CGI and guinea pigs. Which I will henceforth call hamsters, because guinea pig is too much effort to type, and because they are basically the same anyway. Yes, I know your little sister would argue with that. Now that I have played the game, I still don’t have any real idea what the movie is supposed about. There is a plot, but it’s a general Disney fare where the most Jewish looking character is the eventual bad guy (I kid you not).


So what makes this game better than the rest? Well, it’s a 3rd person platformer in the Prince of Persia tradition at heart. You can run around, jump, and use a jetpack to hover and boost upwards. You can also use this jetpack to run forwards really fast which works like running in Gears of War. The hovering mechanic is one of the best I’ve ever seen in a game. You know when a game has an option to glide or hover, and it involve pressing multiple buttons to do it.. so you always fuck up one button at some point in the game? Here you just press A to jump, press and hold A to hover, and that’s it. You never miss any ledge because of this, and it works perfectly. I actually can’t imagine having to go back to the likes of Prototype to fly around after this game.

This is a game
Design-wise, every level is pretty linear, but involves a lot of puzzles to progress. For instance, you may need to lure a laser turret to aim its laser at you while you are standing in front of a wooden door, and then it will blast the door when you move out of the way at the last moment. Or you have to do the same thing while you stand behind some glass that reflects the laser beam into an indestructible enemy to... destruct it. There are a lot of these kinds of puzzles, many of which become a bit harder as you progress, but never too hard.


Besides the platforming, there is a LOT of combat in the game! Combat is done by holding the Left Trigger to enter a Gears of War aiming mode, and then shooting with the Right Trigger. You can also just use RT to wield an electrowhip, which your hamster does with amazing grace. There are no combos in the game or anything, but you can lock onto a target with LB, dodge or backflip with the A button and all that jazz. You have seen this combat before tons of times, but usually you see the shooting in M rated games and usually you see the combat in games like Conan or the like.

The enemies are tied to the story, which goes as follows. A guy named Saber has a corporation that sells appliances. Some evil plan comes to fruition, and all the appliances turn into... Transformers. Remember that scene in de Michael Bay Transformers movie where the Mountain Dew machine and 360 box come to life when the Cube touches the ground? That’s what happens to all appliances in the game, which actually is pretty well done to be fair.


An Iron for instance, will use its metal bottom to block your shields and only open up to shoot at you. A microwave will suck in little spider bots and turn them into bombs, which you need to throw back into its open mouth in order to kill it. There are really a lot of different enemies in the game, that all benefit or require a different approach to kill them. This is amazing really, because games like this usually have only a couple of lame enemies that you just button mash against (*cough* Kung Fu Panda *cough*). The sheer variety and the different approaches to the enemies, who cover a large variety of long and short range attacks as well, keeps the combat fun enough to not slit your wrists for playing one of these games.

While the combat is fun enough, the level design quickly goes from seemingly straightforward and repetitive to still-linear but varied enough. You get to mix up different bits of vertical and horizontal platforming, while solving some environmental puzzles to get to keys and buttons. Sometimes you will need to use Mooch, your trusty remote control fly that nobody cares about if he dies. Using him, you can fly up where Darwin (your hamster character) can’t reach. He can also fly through ventilators by slowing time, which is probably something from the movie. Mooch is equipped with a short paralyzing beam. You use this to do stuff like flying over a forcefield-generator appliance and disabling it, so Darwin can get through and destroy the appliance.



This game also has stuff
During the game, you can hunt for Silver Discs that give you a cheevo and let you upgrade your weapons at Vending Machines. You can also collect money to actually buy this stuff, or to buy a map that shows the locations of these discs. Sometimes the Silver Discs will be easy to find, but a good 50% of them will require some exploration to find them. Good thing you have a map that shows where they are :P

Most of the levels are surprisingly well-paced for a game like this. You go between fast paced combat and “bosses” that are basically just waves of enemies without being able to replenish ammo or health. Then you may have to do some exploring to find out how to progress. Then you may have to kill some enemies to get to a puzzle part. Or maybe you’ll need to disable some switch or forcefield with Mooch. It doesn’t really get very boring unless you play it for more than 3 hours at a time...

There are also 2-3 vehicle section in the game, which are short and only work to break up the pacing a bit. It’s a welcome addition, but these parts are you standard moviegame/generic title fares. You drive around in a hamster-ball vehicle... with guns. The brilliant thing is that these sections work to explain how you get from one area to the next, as if that requires any explanation!! You get some first-person cutscenes at the end of them, which was a surprise. I guess if Portal was that special in that it used... text on walls to tell a story.... then this game is a marvel in storytelling as there is no game that uses first person storytelling in a transparent hamster ball bike vehicle with guns:



Wasn't that just the most innovative way to tell a story in a movie-game, EVER? Hell, if the game has a theme song at the end, I'm sure it would be a hit.

The game’s difficulty settings indicate the amount of lives you are, which work as vita-chamber checkpoints. As in: you die and start at the checkpoint location, but that pesky enemy you tried to kill will have the same amount of health as when you died. Or sometimes you die and have to redo a section if it’s a platforming-based section, it depends. On the Hard difficulty, you have 3 lives which seems like a lot in the beginning. But in later levels, you may curse at some enemies or sections that rape your lives. Thankfully, you can find extra lives to, of which there are usually quite a few to find if you explore a lot.

I have to say, the Hard difficulty is definitely not a walk in the park. Usually on the movie games, you can just go for the Hard difficulty and hope that the game isn’t so horribly developed that you’ll get stuck on totally unfair sections. But this game will really rape any child that tries to play it on hard. Later levels especially will throw a lot of enemies at you, and if you didn’t stock up on ammo or the cash to buy it: you will be fucked. And sometimes even if you did, you will just run out of ammo at some point. It's challenging enough for gamers like us, which is probably why the difficulty is called Challenging...

Switching between melee combat and shooting is pretty easy, and you will soon look like a graceful blackops hamster when you do AoE attacks, melee whips and some shotgun blasts inbetween. It’s pretty fun to do too. It doesn’t really rival Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry, but at times you feel a kind of flow of combat that you really shouldn’t be feeling in a Disney game.



So what?
Well, that is pretty much the core of this game. It’s not supposed to be as good as it is. Granted, it is not a must-buy in any way. Although the campaign is lengthy (I failed to get the “under 8 hours” achievement on the Hard setting) and a Hardest difficulty is unlockable after one playthrough, there is no multiplayer and no real reason to go back through such a long game. However, the same can be said for games like Conan. Games that we look at and say “that game is a total rental”. Games that get reviews in the 7-range from the review sites because it’s not bad but nothing special either. The biggest surprise for G-Force is that it is one of these games. And we all know what movie-games are supposed to be: utter crap.

If I wanted to be a dick and complain/nitpick the inadequacies of this game, I easily could. The level design can suffer from the over-use of some puzzle elements at times, you only play with one of the G-Force characters throughout the entire game if you don’t count Mooch, there is little character building, no real story, etc etc, bla bla dickitydick.

But disregarding that stuff that you don’t care about in a fun rental, you get pretty good graphics, fun gameplay, a lengthy campaign, pretty precise controls and most importantly: a Gears/God of Hamster War game. Oh and it’s also available in stereoscopic 3D, but I didn’t play. Probably because that’s only for the PS3? No idea, who the fuck plays a game through colored glasses anyway...

All in all, this game is a pleasant surprise. I expected a shit movie game with cheevos. I got a great movie game with cheevos that weren’t even that easy to get. If you look past the license, there is a pretty decent rental to be found here. And that’s all it is really: a good rental. And let's be serious, that’s not what anyone could have expected after trailers like these:





Also, look at this vid to get a good idea of the combat:




Happy ratings time!
So, a surprisingly good title for a Disney movie game that's worth playing even if you are playing a goddamn guinea pig with a shotgun and a laser whip. Fighting PC's and toasting irons. It's awesome.

I rate this game:

42/40 DEAD WOLF FURRIES

or

8.5/10 rentals



Here, have a Monkey Island Dance remix to boot!