Bourne is back, and this time he doesn't look like Matt Damon! Is that a good thing? Well yes, for a while at least. Look at this video if you haven't seen it yet:


The Bourne Conspiracy tries to capture the fast paced action of the Bourne movies, and tries to keep the story of the Bourne Identity intact while it expands on it. Things that were only mentioned at the end of the movie, or not at all, are missions this time around. But don't expect to play through all three movies, it only focuses on Identity. It might focus on the books more than the movie, but I haven't read the books...

Conspiracy does a number of things right. The melee combat is handled pretty well, although it's terribly shallow. You just encounter an enemy, hold A to block, wait for an opening, hit back with a combo of X and Y button-mashing and then block again. If you repeat this enough times, your Adrenaline meter fills up and you can do a Takedown. Takedowns instantly kill normal enemies, as you smash them violently into the surroundings. This is a lot of fun and it really never gets old to watch it.

The downside of the melee combat is the lack of depth. With two attack buttons, there's not a whole lot of variety since most combo's are made up of three attacks. If you play the game on Assassin (the hardest difficulty), you'll encounter some bosses that lose 1% health when you land a succesful combo. They will also do 25% damage for every combo they land. This leads to a boss fight that can easily last for 10 minutes, while you just block and take cheap shots to fill up your meter. Usually it takes about 10-15 takedown moves to kill a boss, and around 3-5 successful combo hits to fill up the meter enough to do a takedown. Combine this with a lack of moves, it gets very tedious, very fast.

In fact, the Assassin difficulty is really a bitch. You die very easily, even if you have a regenerating health bar. I got tired of dying over and over again at endless boss fights, so I changed back to normal after a couple of missions. I had no regrets :)

One of worst things about the game are the shooting sections. You are given a 3rd person over-the-shoulder view with a target reticule that is about 4 pixels large. Shooting enemies in their chest is pretty useless, so the game tries to make you do headshots. There are also achievements for getting a lot of headshots and for getting a high accuracy, so it definitely feels like you should go for the headshots. However, the controls fail. It doesn't have the worst controls ever, but you'll see yourself overshoot someone's head a lot of times. Sometimes you finally lined up at someone's head, shoot, and see him crouch down at the last moment. By the time you've adjusted your miniature reticule on his crouched head, the enemy will stand up again, etc etc...

You can also use Bourne instinct to slow down time a little and to make yourself autotarget enemies, which works around 20% of the time. It helps, but not much.

Luckily, spraying around with machineguns gets you a lot of automatic headshots if you just mow over the enemies. You can also do shooting takedowns with your adrenaline meter, which gives you QTE's for shooting down multiple enemies at once. Too bad it doesn't work as well as the same attack in Stranglehold, because any enemy that is only slightly out of sight just gets skipped. There's an achievement for shooting down 200 enemies this way though, so you'll want to use it a lot.

The flimsy 3rd person controls wouldn't be as bad as they were if the game didn't kill you so many times on Assassin difficulty. Five bullets and it's back to the checkpoint. Thankfully there are a lot of checkpoints, but the difficulty feels cheap because you often die because you miss the heads with the ammo you have.

The melee and shooting sections are mixed up pretty well, keeping a breakneck pacing most of the time. Sometimes you have to run away from a helicopter, shoot propane tanks to make it stop shooting you, and do some pre-rendered animations as you make your escape. All of this looks and plays pretty cinematic, even if it could've been done 10 years ago with uglier graphics and more wooden animation.


That's really the main thing about Conspiracy: it looks great in motion, it feels like a lot of fun when you have to fight your way through a linear level, but after a while you kind of see through the game and notice how shallow and derivative the gameplay mechanics are. There is also some driving, which is really ridiculously easy and linear. It's best to just ignore the existence of the driving, it just sucks.

Yet at the same time, the game is still a blast to play throughout the 5-7 hours it takes to complete it on the normal difficulty. QTE's riddle every part of the game, but they are never really an obstacle to plain enjoyment. The achievements are also pretty fun: they'll make you go through levels multiple times just to get the 200 takedowns or melee kills without using takedowns. In fact, the game's menu keeps track of how many people you kills/took down/headshotted etc and shows you your achievement progress in an incredible easy way. I can't believe any other game has done it in the same way using the ingame menu instead of the 360 one, but it works and it's great. Hopefully other games will copy it.

All in all, The Bourne Conspiracy is a fun game while it lasts. Too bad it doesn't last very long, or does anything special. The fighting is cool for as long as it feels 'new' and amazing. Basically it's just like Stranglehold but with stylish hand to hand combat: short, fun for a while and one of the best rentals of the season. The game also has graphics and sound!

I'd say it's a 6.5/10 on a 10-scale, expect some 6's and 8's in the next week from the regular review sites.

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