G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Review - Videogaming poison

We all know movie licensed games tend to end up as simple cash in opportunities churned out in as short a time as possible to earn money for a few weeks then vanish into bargain bins around the world. Every now and then however you get a good one, a freak occurrence where the movie's plot and subject matter lends itself to gaming perfectly and the developers resist the urge to take the easy option, instead grasping the chance to do something clever and rewarding within the boundaries such a licence offers.

Which brings us to the movie licence in question today, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra. On the face of it the recent film looks like it could support a game pretty well. It may not be in line for any Oscars, but it's got the CGI heavy blockbuster action film thing down pat. It even sounds like a game with its elite soldiers in super powered suits fighting against a larger than life pantomime villain. Perfect. All it needed was for developers Double Helix Games to put in the required effort and we'd surely have something at least half decent on our hands.

Of course that's where things appear to have gone wrong.

In simple terms what we've got here is a third-person run-and-gun shooter that's pretty much as generic as you can get. Boasting game design that wouldn't have been revolutionary back on the PS1 it manages to feel positively antiquated on a console where you could be playing something like Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Showing a complete lack of faith in either their own control system or their intended audience's ability, Double Helix have seen fit to implement a far too effective automated targeting system which does its best to remove every last element of skill from proceedings. Not happy with just that there's also a recharging health bar and clunky cover system that do their best to remove all sense of risk as well. For those that that care there's a dozen or so playable characters who, in keeping with the rest of the game, offer little variation in the gameplay experience save for some variety in weaponry.

GI Joe's single interesting mechanic is the 'Acceleration Suit' which imbues your chosen Joe with short bursts of special powers (speed boosts, extra firepower, you know the drill) when you've charged it up enough by killing bad guys (how would that actually work I wonder?). It's hardly an original idea and it's not very well implemented here, especially since the game's inherent lack of challenge makes any extra power you're given seem almost unfair on your foes.

To be fair, GI Joe isn't as easy as I'm perhaps making it sound, oh no. To stop it being as simple as it could be the game's been blessed with the camera system from hell to keep things interesting. With its movement completely out of your control it seems to do its best to frame the action in the worst possible way at every given point. Because of this you'll be regularly forced to contend with enemies who'll happily kill you from off screen before you even know they're there. Things become genuinely laughable should you ever want to backtrack through part of a level as you'll often be expected to blindly navigate the environments because the camera refuses to spin round, leaving you running into the screen. Not that back tracking is ever really needed, the levels are linear to a fault and you'll rarely want to see any part of them again due to the blandness of their design.

Unwisely there are also a few vehicle sections that crop up now and then to try and alleviate the boredom. I say unwisely because by mapping accelerate and break/reverse as well as left and right onto the left analogue stick they've managed to make the experience painfully fiddly to control. Our old friend the camera also does its best to add confusion at every point possible by making it tough to see upcoming enemies until the last minute.

You'll come up against boss battles at certain points too but rather than offering an occasional spark of gaming joy they become little more than a dull war of attrition. Can you avoid being hit long enough for your automated targeting and permanently pressed fire trigger to do their job? If yes then you'll win, if not then you'll have the pleasure of trying again.

In fact should you at any point die you'll find the game take great delight in making you play sections of it again and again thanks to an apparently broken check-pointing system. Rather than pop you back on screen at the last one you passed (and you'll know when you've passed them as it tells you quite obviously) it merrily places you right back at the start of the level so you have to do it all again, checkpoints and all.

I'm perhaps sounding harsh here, and I've really tried not to be if for no other reason than I'm blatantly not the target market and, however unlikely, there remains a shred of a chance that a ten year-old child hyped up on the whiz-bang glamour of the film may find some sliver of entertainment somewhere in the bowels of this gaming travesty. For example, the plot, such as it is, takes place after the events of the film so I suppose fans may get something from the extra snippets of narrative, but really, is it worth it?

Of course if the aforementioned child or fan has played any other current-gen game they're likely to point and laugh at the graphics for longer than they'll actually want to play it. As you'd probably expect by this point of the review there's nothing here visually that's ever anything more than functional at best. Blocky detail free environments, character models that clunk around the place and voice acting that fails to be even amusingly poor are pretty much all you get.

Before you write of the entire GI Joe games canon however there is one bright(ish) point. While you'd be absolutely right to avoid the Xbox 360 version (and one would assume the PS3 incarnation is startlingly similar) of this train wreck, the DS version actually turns out to be worth more than a moment of your time. Don't get me wrong, this is no classic but it's a millions times better than the versions on the bigger consoles.

Taking a top down view of things, its an unashamedly old school shooter but one that turns out to be a whole bundle of unassuming fun. Unlike it's siblings on the bigger consoles combat on the DS can be a pleasure at times with boss battles in particular proving an entertaining challenge. It's not without it's flaws of course, there's some weak collision detection at times and the way it moves the plot along with low-res movie stills smacks of it being rushed out the door but ai still provides a solid slice of fun.

So there we have it, a film licence that (bar the DS version) ends up as little more than an expensive coaster. Not a huge surprise of course but the real shame is that licenses like GI Joe have the potential to inspire enjoyable games, perhaps even more so than enjoyable films. It just needs the people on development duty to care (or, to be fair, be given the time and budget to show they care). No doubt people will still buy this and it'll end up making publishers EA a whole bundle of money before being chalked up as a success on a balance sheet somewhere. Unfortunately that healthy looking balance sheet will then be read by people who'll gasp and wonder at how easy it was to make a killing before promptly reducing the development time and budget on their next big movie tie-in to see if they can squeeze a little more profit out next time round. And so the cycle continues...

25%