Review: The Bourne Conspiracy
The game adaption of the “Bourne Trilogy” has been long predicted. With memorable fight scenes using a rarely seen martial art (Krav Maga), short but action packed gun slinging scenes and an epic storyline, how could they not do it right?
While the The Bourne Conspiracy held true when following the event timeline it also lost some things on the way.
The graphics, while not extreme held up nicely throughout. I don’t remember witnessing one frame drop on the way which lately in games has been quite a trend. I did however notice that a lot of the enemies repeated themselves. In each level you won’t be fighting more than three variants of the same enemy which isn’t a huge flaw, but this is outdated and lazy. They cover up most evidence of this flaw by giving the enemies balaclavas, helmets and masks.
The driving was awful and boring. It felt more like you were driving a Lego car than a real one. However this is only in one level throughout the game so it’s nothing that can’t be forgiven.
The gameplay is basic yet has the potential to be something much bigger and much better. Hitting triangle gives you a “heavy attack” while square gives you a flimsy jab. Hold Triangle, and you will do a strong reverse kick which can at times be useful unlike square’s variant which merely makes them stumble back. The problem is, most of the moves that take time are useless and usually get your face pummelled. The square kick for instance makes them stumble backwards. This would be amazing if enemies could be kicked from roof tops or into a brick wall. Instead they hit an invisible wall and take no further damage.
If you take an enemy right to a wall and manage to get in a light kick, he will merely step backwards, and then comes full force in your face to give you a battering until you throw the controller. What would have been good would be the ability to kick them off of 50 feet rooftops or slam their heads against the wall knocking them out.
Another flaw in the combat is the skill of the standard enemy compared to Jason’s in movie skill. If you’re fighting one man, most of the time you will beating him down with the repetitive Square, Triangle Square combo. It’s as if the developers never watched the combat speed in the film. Jason never hung around for 30+ seconds getting a bloody nose from trading punches with a pissed off security guard. Instead he would counter the man’s punch and level him into the closest wall. While they couldn’t cut all punch/kick combat, they could have shortened it by at least half.
This is where the finishers come in. After trading enough pathetic combos’, you build up a meter which gives the ability to one shot an enemy.
Sadly, the main fights I couldn’t wait for were the boss fights. While nothing bad, they aren’t really anything revolutionary either. Most of them are just your standard grunts but with the strength of 20 men. This doesn’t lead down to it being hard, just repetitive. To beat any boss in this game easily, you can do the following: Hold block and take all the attacks he gives you, then press Square, Triangle and Square until you have a finisher meter filled. This is not what we wanted to see. We wanted the boss fights to be epic. We wanted to be thrown through cabinets, beaten into a desk and still use reading material to kick his ass. We did not want to hold X and then attack back with the best combo in the game.
Sadly it doesn’t give you enough interactivity with your environment. The one idea behind Krav Maga and the Bourne movies were that you can use anything around you as a weapon. Sadly, the only time anything can be used in hand to hand combat is when you have a finisher. It doesn’t let you improvise weapons, instead, it makes them glow bright yellow and only available after throwing out twenty punches where after he’s hurt the guy with it, throws it away.
That brings me on to the good parts of the game. Where the combat’s speed was 100 times slower than that of the movies, it didn’t make it any less fun.
Semi dropkicking an unaware bodyguard with a saved up finisher, stealing his gun and popping a silenced .40 in his friends head has never really looked quite so good.
Sometimes you will let yourself die just so you can continue from the checkpoint, and find all new ways of making it look like something Bourne would do.
All of the finishers looked awesome. Whether you’re smashing their face into glass or giving them a concussion with a chair, it always looks true to Bourne. The memorable scene with the pencil in hand is in there which was nice. Again though, only available during a finisher.
It’s just a shame it felt so repetitive to fight until you got the finishers.
At times it feels like the combat was forced on you when it shouldn’t be. One fight which should not have involved even a punch ended up being a brawl which wasn’t a huge pain but felt as if the game was hanging by combat alone instead of its other factors.
While the shooting wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t great either. It was something you’d expect to see on a Syphon Filter but not a Bourne game. After some practise it was easy to get used to and by the end you will be shooting guards in the head while running along dodging bullets yourself.
If you have a finisher saved, you can use this to kill off an enemy using the gun in some standard looking shooting sequence, however get three finishers saved, and Jason gun down three enemies.
While this was an obvious addition, it was useless. By the time you manage to get three finishers, you will either be able to kill three enemies with ease or have the temptation to dropkick them.
The soundtrack, while okay, hung on John Powell’s skill from the movies and would have been nice to see him return for an even more epic score. During the movies you hear every bit of music; it’s just how awesome it is. In the games, I forgot it was even playing. I didn’t even hear Moby in the credits at the end which even though I’ve heard his song a hundred times, would have been nice to hear just for authenticity’s sake.
While I’ve made this out to sound like a bad game, it really isn’t. Its combat is fun, despite flaws. Its finishers look awesome and you really do kick everyone’s ass throughout the game. It does keep well to the movies at most parts but considering it is based from the book, I can’t blame it for taking you in different directions time to time.
The shooting wasn’t great but when you get good, you become just as much deserving as being labelled the “30 million dollar weapon”. You will probably not bother to collect the hidden passports around the game as it doesn’t have enough to keep you there however the certain items you unlock at the end of the game will make you come back for at least one more run through. Two other things that would have completed this game were to make it run through all three films and have Matt Damon, Chris Cooper and Franka Potente star.
7/10. – Definitely rent, don’t buy.
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