I recently acquired this game, and decided to write a mini-review, or my first impressions of G.I Joe: Rise of the Cobra. I tend to dislike games based on movies, but I thought I’d give it a try before writing it off.
First off, storyline:
There is hardly what you can call a storyline in this game. It IS supposed to be a shooter though, so I didn’t expect too much. I’m not sure how the storyline fits in with the movie, since the baroness is currently imprisoned by the crew of the G.I Joe, which only happened at the end. Duke mentions Paris, so I’m assuming that the timeline is set after the movie.
After the cutscene, Breaker explains a few things right off the bat. “New equipment,” he says. One of which is the ammo counter. The ammo counter is located in the lower left hand corner of your top screen. It is a bar that is filled with weapon shells. When you start shooting, the shells start to deplete. However, seeing you have infinite ammo, you probably won’t need to worry much about this too much, and chances are you won’t even notice until you need to reload. Next is your secondary weapon gauge, just above the ammo counter. After you fire your secondary weapon, it goes to zero and slowly starts rising again. This does not seem to be the case for Snake Eyes, though, since he uses a Katana. Lastly, there is the special ability meter. It fills up with every action token you collect, which is done by eliminating an enemy. After you down an enemy, they leave behind these tokens, which you can pick up. When your special ability meter is full, or white, you then have the option to activate special abilities by pressing R. According to Breaker, there are a few special abilities, which range from “force fields, rapid fire and TOTAL DEVASTATION.” Eh. Anyways.One of the things Breaker DOESN’T explain to you about is your HP. It may not be obvious at first, but you aren’t given a HP bar. Instead, the sides of the screen start flashing red if you get hit repeatedly, not unlike Gears Of War on XBOX 360.
After Breaker’s explanation, you start off with Heavy Duty, the big black dude known for his badassery. The first thing you’ll notice is that the camera is in overhead view. I haven’t played many games with an overhead view, but I got used to it pretty quickly. One complaint that I have is that the camera angles get pretty weird when you’re going up a hill. The graphics aren’t horrible, but they aren’t great, especially for a newer game. I think EA could have done better in this aspect. Most of the action takes place on the top screen, and on the bottom screen is your map. Controls are pretty straightforward. B is to shoot your primary weapon, Y shoots your secondary weapon, X is your melee attack, A is to dodge and L reloads. After the first mission, you get to choose from multiple characters, like Duke, Scarlett, Snake Eyes and Ripcord. There are more, but they’ll only be unlocked as your progress through the game.
There are some minor flaws that make G.I. Joe a less than good game. One of which is, you don’t get to shoot while running, which gets pretty annoying. Also, dodge is pretty much useless as an action. It is slow, laggy and really doesn’t do much for me. The enemies teleport in and out of the map, appearing out of nowhere. Chalk it up to some new teleportation device M.A.R.S is trying out.
In G.I Joe: Rise of the Cobra, you get to operate a vehicle in some instances. It is controlled almost exactly the same way you would your character, but much, much harder. This is most likely the worst aspect of this game. Controlling the tank is so hard I think they should have done away with it completely.
The save system is very flawed and gets frustrating at times. There doesn’t seem to be any way to save your game, aside from checkpoints at random locations. You don’t even know when the game saves. After you die a few times, you have to start over from the beginning of the map. If you decide to quit to the main menu, you can choose which mission you want to play if you’ve already attempted it.
All in all, G.I. Joe is a game that could have succeeded if only more thought was put into it. I really hoped it would be a decent “movie game”. Oh well.