Jason Bourne has been called our generations James Bond. Except he gets laid much less. Anyway, his first adventure in the next generation of gaming is almost here and we can now try it out via the demo currently on Xbox Live. I gave it a thorough play through last night and although fun at times, the game did not make it self stand out in any way.
Let’s get the basic shit out of the way. The voice acting is still very good despite the fact you will not find Matt Damon anywhere in this game. His likeness and voice are completely different instead of it being impersonated. Major plus. Nothing is worse when a game tries mimic a movie star and it falls flat. The character models are impressive. They have correct shade, proportion, and are not buggy when they move around.
The game play, well, this is where I take issue. Hand to hand combat is by far the biggest aspect of the game. You hold A to block, X or Y for attacks or hold X or Y for a kick. If you gain enough adrenaline( a meter that fills in the HUD based on your attacks), you are rewarded with a takedown which acts as a finisher by pressing B. So far so good. Simple, yet effective control scheme. The issue is in its application. Button mashing won’t work here so you need to attack, hold block, attack, hold block, then use a takedown when you earn one. This is fine for the generic villains, but gets very boring when you have to do this for several minutes for a boss. The game tries to be realistic but the boss’s can take a ton of damage, where a few hits to Bourne will drain his energy. The gun play is standard. The target reticule is very small and the enemies can take a lot of damage unless you score a headshot.
You can use Bourne Sense by pressing Y while sprinting to find where to go, but the demo levels were on rails; very disappointing. The demo lets you play the bank escape from the first movie, a gun play level where you must board a cargo jet, and finally a short driving mission. They are varied which is a plus/
The final verdict here is that this could be a very fun game but seems like it could get very repetitive very soon. If thats the case, its going to be a rental. The demo offered no look at multiplayer. If you love the demo, I would wait for a few reviews to surface before spending your dough.
5 Comments
Write a Comment»It’s a shame it gets repetitive already in the demo. Hopefully there is more variety in the full game
That was the exact impression i had when i played the demo last night. It looked monotnous at times and that’s a problem if a game is so. Overall the game is shaping out pretty well hopefully those working on the game can fix that minor issue.
There’s no multiplayer in the full version, they announced that on G4.
I loved the hand to hand to combat. The first level you play is the best part from the demo. I didn’t mind to much that it was linear since it felt very arcady with the clock but in a good way. The gunplay was ok, it was bit different from similar games since you don’t need to hold a trigger button to have your gun rasied out. Its always like when you got a gun.
I agree that the boss did take forever to beat. The finishing moves you can pull off are great but they give the boss way to much health. About Matt Damon not being in the game, he didn’t want to be in it. The reason was because he thought it was to violent (wft?). Not that its a big deal really since the Bourne series is originally based off the books.
Its good to hear the hand to hand combats were great since it was an important aspect during the action scenes in the movie. As for the gun play dammit it doesn’t sound to be so doing good.