Bourne to Do It
Posted on July 12, 2008 by Mark
No this won’t be a retrospective of the music of Craig David, I’ve just completed the Bourne Conspiracy for the Xbox 360.
If you haven’t seen my video review of the game you can see it here. So my video went up after a couple of days of game play and this goes up about a week later, is it me or are games getting easier? I played the game on medium difficulty (for the most part but I will talk about that later) and I didn’t think I played it for too long in one sitting.
Anyway to my post completion review: I loved this game! Like any movie game I expected it to suck and whilst it doesn’t really do anything new it is true to the story of the first film, goes back in time to show plausible events from before it and totally captures the essence of being Jason Bourne. The one thing that really surprised me was the button-press mechanic, you know when a prompt appears on screen and you get a few seconds to press that button. Normally I hate these but they were employed well in this game as they were not too frequent and in most cases initiated by you rather than the game. I don’t think it suffers from not having Matt Damon’s voice or visage in it and I found the main voice acting more than acceptable.
As I said in my video review the combat is brutal even though its not varied in the moves it gives you and your tactics consist of being extremely defensive for the most part. However it is satisfying because it makes you think like Jason Bourne, while you are blocking and jabbing you are thinking where to manoeuvre your target for the take down and even though there is an obvious one in most situations it is more interesting to see an object off at the side and think “I bet I can smack him into that!”. I had a a massive grin on my face after fighting a guy on a balcony and thinking “Right now I’d smack his head on that banister rail”, I hit the button and out of a dozen possibilities its exactly what the game did! Boss fights are a bit repetitive but take the downs make it fun and you really get into the mind set of hitting the guy as hard and fast as you can- you don’t get to play with them or jockey for a better position.
The shooting mechanic is not as bad as I felt it was at first, yes its not that accurate but its one of those things you get into. Though you couldn’t roll from cover to cover the game actually relies a lot on the type of cover and I found the destructive cover added a lot of realism. I particularly enjoyed the need to reload frequently and little detail of when you reloaded you dropped a dead mag on the ground.
There were two driving sections and even though there were only two driving events in the film I feel they could have added one or maybe two more from Bourne’s previous missions. However they were rubbish so maybe that’s why, they did feel bolted on and were neither interesting or particularly hard.
So in conclusion I enjoyed this game and it makes me look forward to a sequel. Hand to hand was great, shooting was ok, driving was pants. Whilst there was nothing original I liked what I got and above all I felt it captured the atmosphere of the film and did justice to the dramatic hand to hand battles that are what really attracts me the character of Jason Bourne.
