Now that Mass Effect's DRM is no longer salting my balls, I'll replace the old rant with a new rant.
Last night I finished downloading The Bourne Conspiracy demo. 360 players have had it for a little while now, so I'm old news. I don't care, so here's what I think.
I've found that this demo is so fucking indicative of how the ENTIRE game plays, that I'm going to review it right now. It's one of the only demos I've seen that tell you exactly what the game is like and allows you to judge whether you will enjoy it or not. I'm that fucking confident that the game will turn out this way. I'd bet my limited edtion copy of Ar Tonelico (worth a Benjamin on eBay) on it, but I'm not sure how you'd bet on a thing like this, so I won't.
While it technically isn't a movie tie-in, it may as well be. If you want to know what Jason Bourne looks like, take Matt Damon's body, rip off his face, and replace it with Nathan Drake's, minus the sense of humor.
If you want to know what the gameplay's like, extend a Shenmue Quick Time Event to (presumably) ten hours, inject it with Yakuza's item/environment-involved melee combat, break the legs of Gears of War's shooting and let it drag itself over the threshold, and throw in a bit of driving as The Getaway would have it. Then pepper it with a pinch of Stranglehold.
Sounds terrible, don't it?
I have to say that it works surprisingly well. Unlike Dark Sector, The Bourne Conspiracy manages to leverage the whole hash into something relatively unique and actually rather exciting.
The first stage shows off this whole long-ass QTE business best. Taken straight from the embassy scene in the movie. Jason starts in a 3-way brawl with some security guards. The enemies attack one-by-one, but the game manages to make it look semi-realistic by beginning every individual combat with a couple of cutscene-like punches that open up the sequence.
In melee there's a light punch and a heavy punch, and putting them together results in combos. A token block button rounds it out. You can just punch until the enemy ragdolls, but that's not fun, innit? Combat builds an adrenaline bar, and when tiers get filled, you can press circle to trigger a takedown.
Takedowns are fatality moves that usually involve an environment object or a series of very fucking painful-looking punches or kicks. The near-automatic maneuvers aren't much unlike Assassin's Creed's contextual counter-kills, but there seem to be a hell of a lot more animations, even variations on using the same environment object. When fighting more than one enemy, a takedown can take multiple foes out, becoming a semi-quicktime event where pressing the buttons in time can kill or damage more foes than the one you fought at the time.
And painful it looks. The game flows like the slapstick, object-centered Jackie Chan stunt sequences coupled with the efficient brutality of, well, the Bourne film's fights. I actually said "ooh" during a couple of fights.
Unfortunately, the overall fight mechanics don't hold up quite as well. While you wait to build your adrenaline to takedown levels you just kind of mash the punch buttons (or hold for a kick), timing your blocks to the enemies' counterattacks. Enemies and bosses can attempt their own takedowns, but you can block and counter by timing the button presses (another QTE).
There are also shooting and driving modes. Both are easily the weakest portions of the game. Shooting involves cover, and activating a "Bourne instinct" triggers a very short slow-mo period where Bourne auto-aims toward the nearest enemy or exploding barrel-like object. You also have shooting takedowns that are like the "whirlwind dove release" Tequila Bomb moves from Stranglehold.
Driving is crap. The Mini Cooper understeers like a greased hippo and the entire driving stage consists of running around a circle for 90 seconds and then doing a 3-button QTE.
Other problems emerge. As Yahtzee pointed out in his review of Uncharted, sudden jarring QTE's pop up, resulting in certain death (unless you have Bourne's reaction speed in real life) unless you know where they are. That admittedly minor annoyance is exacerbated by the fact that the "press or die" button cues are randomized ala Spider-Man 3. You'll end up restarting more checkpoints than you should because your thumb was on triangle when the game wanted circle this iteration.
Navigation feels a little unintuitive. To reveal navigation markers on your map you need to activate your Bourne slo-mo, which feels unecessary, except to reveal that High Moon didn't want a glowing red object to be there on the main screen. But the glowing still happens in the driving sequences and to highlight the parachute you'll use to escape or the fire extinguisher you might want to use in the next takedown. And the game proceeds so linearly that you even wonder why there's a need for navigation at all. For the way the game flows The Bourne Conspiracy could be a rail shooter (rail puncher?).
This would have killed the typical action game that followed the mold of Devil May Cry or God of War, but thankfully this game doesn't follow that mold. In fact, it doesn't quite follow any particular mode, cherry-picking some of the key elements of third-person shooters, brawlers, action adventures, and combo games to make you feel like you're playing a movie.
And that's actually a good thing. Bourne's the ideal game for when you're playing with a friend or family member in the room that would rather watch you play than participate himself (I have a bunch of those). It's a great ride and the dynamic animations help to gloss over the mechanical flaws. Hell, the scenes are great to watch and you may want to watch them again, like a DVD of 300 or, well...Bourne.
Rent it. It's that or the Iron Man game, God forbid. If they minimize the shooting and driving and maximize the running action sequences, it might even merit a full purchase.
7/10 - Replayable, fun, but nothing innovative or amazing. The game potentially has large flaws that, while they don't make the game bad, prevent it from being as good as it could be.
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(# 0) on 05/10/2008 01:47
(# 1) on 05/10/2008 02:37
(# 2) on 05/10/2008 09:49
It's a minor problem, but you WILL end up failing unnecessarily once or twice.