Sierra Spring Event: The Bourne Conspiracy impressions

2:48 PM on 04.28.2008   |   Hamza CTZ Aziz

9 comments

Oh boy, another game that's based on a movie. Wait! What's this?! The Bourne Conspiracy looks good and *GASP*, fun?! 

I left very impressed with all that The Bourne Conspiracy has to offer. The game has a very unique and cinematic feel to it that really helps set it apart from all the other running and gunning games out there. Before you hit the jump for my full impressions of The Bourne Conspiracy, be sure to watch the above trailer. It'll give you a better sense of what I'm talking about as you read on.

The action started right off with Bourne trying to escape a U.S. Embassy. The Embassy is about to go into lockdown in three minutes and you have to get out of there as fast as possible. Since you're fighting against U.S. soldiers, Bourne won't engage them with guns. Luckily for Bourne, everything around him is a weapon.

Each area of a room is a potential a weapon for Bourne. See a picture framed in glass? Attract a soldier close enough to it and you can smash his head right into the frame. Cabinets, electrical boxes, every goddamn thing you see can be used against people. 

Since you're in a hurry here, you really don't have much time to engage people in hand-to-hand combat. This is where we get to see one of Bourne's other moves called the Sprint Takedown. As you're running through a hallway, you come up across a guard on patrol. Before he knows what hits him, Bourne runs up by the soldier, knocks him out, and continues on his pathl, all in one fluid motion.

After a few more rooms, you come across a mini-boss, a Captain of the Marines. The Captain, and any mini-boss, will have the same takedown attacks as you. After taking out the Captain, Bourne heads to the roof, encountering more guards and some snipers. As you're engaged with the soldiers, the snipers will hold fire until they have a clear shot. Still, the snipers aren't quick enough for Bourne as he makes his escape from the Embassy. 

The game will switch between the present time where everyone on the planet is hunting Bourne down to Bourne's past where he was working as an assassin for Treadstone. The game is based off the books and movies, as Bourne is trying to figure out who he is.

In this flashback mission, Bourne has to find an escaped prisoner and take him out. The prisoner has a lot of his forces with him so you have to take them out as the prisoner runs away. Here we see The Bourne Conspiracy's gunplay. It's pretty much your standard shooting system. You can switch on the fly between left and right positions for any of the guns and the adrenaline system is in play here with the guns as well. Using your adrenaline will take enemies out with one shot.

If you're low on adrenaline, all you need to do is engage people in hand-to-hand combat until you recover some adrenaline back. The adrenaline works with fist fighting as well. If you have three enemies surrounding you, you can use  adrenaline and take them all out quickly. Once you start this up, you have to follow the context-sensitive buttons that pop up on the screen. Say you hit the first two buttons but mess up on the third button press. You'll still take out the first two guys, but the third guy will still be alive.

Advancing further along in the level, we see that Bourne can grab enemies and use them as a human shield. Bourne can also destroy cover to get better shots at people. The overused explosive barrels are scattered about, too, for your sadistic usage. 

Finally, the prisoner has jumped onto a plane and you jump right on with him. There are few more soldiers to take out and someone forgot to close the back hatch on the plane. You can probably see where this is going. After a couple of soldiers are thrown off the plane and after a jeep nearly smashes right into your face, it's time to square off with the mini-boss prisoner.

We're shown one final mission and this level is based off of the famous Mini Cooper chase from the first movie. You're driving around in the Mini Cooper avoiding cops and trying to reach your destination. Takedowns can be performed here as well, one of which shows Bourne's car getting smacked in the rear by a bus and a few cop cars smashing into the bus. 

Overall, the game looks amazing. This, on top of Ghostbusters, made me realize that there are developers that can actually make games based off of movies. Speaking of movies, you'd swear the entire Bourne game is just one long cinematic. The camera angles will shift in ways that would make you think you're supposed to drop the controller and watch a cinematic, but in reality, you're still playing. The only negative thing about the demo I had was with the car chase level. The car seemed very stiff, and it feels like an unnecessary part to the game.

If you don't want to take my word for it, though, there will be a demo of The Bourne Conspiracy coming out in May in both America and Europe. The demo for the Xbox 360 will be out on May 5th and it will be out on May 8th for the PSN. Europe will get the demo May 19th on LIVE and May 22nd on the PSN. The full game will be released this June for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.