Star Wars: The Force Unleashed – Ultimate Sith Edition Review - PC

Summary:
You’re obviously a PC gamer who’s reading this and you also realize how painful the wait has been since Star Wars: The Force Unleashed released last  year for the Xbox 360 and PS3. Now it makes its presence felt on the PC will all the DLCs - the Jedi Academy, Tatooine and Hoth levels. But now that’s it here, does it measure up?
Good:

• Amazing story line, the best of any Star Wars stories so far
• Awesome level design
• Super cool moves, you can actually FEEL the force
• Nice costumes, skins, saber options

Bad

• Frustrating targeting
• Loads of glitches
• Some game sequences are really ridiculous.

Ugly

• WTF system requirements!
• Poor game engine

The Story:
You play StarKiller, Darth Vader’s very handpicked secret apprentice.  In the years between Episodes III and IV, Darth Vader trains your and puts you to work. You mission:  mopping up the few remaining Jedi.

Graphics:
The graphics are nothing short of mind blowing. From the opening sequence where you play as Darth Vader and face off against the wookies to the stunning levels of Hoth, it’s a Star Wars visual treat! If you played it on the Xbox 360 or PS3, you’ll know just how awesome it was! However, since it’s in for the PC, you’d expect some sort of change, better graphics, better physics etc. but nope, you receive pretty much what you saw on the console…and trust me, it’s a bad port. We tested it on our lowly dual core machine with a 4850 and it ran like sucked nuts. Make sure you have a Core2Quad at least with a 9800gt+ card or better.

Controls:
The controls are… well, annoying at times. The Keyboard mouse combo is easier than playing with the game pad, but the overall experience wasn’t great. Blame it on poor camera angles and frustrating targeting mechanisms.

Gameplay:
I’m inclined to say such great things here, but I can’t. To be very honest, it does some things very well and bombs on a few others. For those of you who’ve played Star Wars: Jedi Academy, you’d think this was the same game on steroids, but it’s just a scaled down version of its game play. The biggest surprise and let down,  is that there are only four main force powers: Push, Grip, Repulse and Lightning - they’re upgradable though and can be used in devastating combination. But really…just 4 is a let down.

But whatever little they give you, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed doles out your powers at a leisurely pace over nine missions, from the gorgeous fungal terrain of Felucia to the vivid metallic graveyard of Raxus Prime, but the coolest are available right from the start. Using Force Grip and Force Push, you can pick up and throw or just knock around parts of the environment, from enemies who reach out in mid-air for a handhold to exploding barrels and scrap metal. Lobbing debris around is fun and deviously entertaining as  you send crowds of stormtroopers hurtling through glass and chuck exploding orbs into passing Tie Fighters, you can almost forgive the piss poor targeting system.
Then there is my favorite - Force Lightning and heaving your lightsaber around like a boomerang, but I found that Force Grip and Force Push made the most entertaining use of the clutter in the early missions. One fault I found with Grip and Push, however, was that larger objects like AT-ST laser turrets take a lot of force to lift. That makes sense logistically but standing still in the middle of a laser spray to mentally heft a huge piece of  debris leaves you like a sitting duck waiting ready to have its goose cooked!

In terms of the additional content, what you’re getting here is an extension of the base game, something that simply adds more content to the experience but doesn’t actually change (or even fix) anything. At very start you’ll notice that the three additional levels are standalone options, so you don’t need to play through the game in order to get to them.  The downside to this is that none of your powers or anything else carries over, nor does anything that you earn carry back into the main game. However, that largely doesn’t matter as you start almost fully powered-up for each of these levels anyway. What the DLCs are like, I’ll leave it to you to discover, but I’ll talk a little about the Hoth level, which again is the only exclusive bit to the Ultimate Sith Edition. Now it isn’t quite as exciting as either the Jedi Academy or Tatooine levels as the Hoth base is essentially just a series of square rooms and corridors connecting them. It looks great, mind you, and is pretty much dead-on with what you see in Empire, but it doesn’t really make for the most interesting level to fight through.

After slicing and dicing for a while, you’ll face off with Luke Skywalker. The battle with him is much tougher than the fight against either Boba Fett or Obi-Wan, but that’s because he can be pretty cheap. He has attacks that are very frustrating, and there can be guys out of the area that you’re in that constantly shoot at you. It’s not a terrible fight, but it’s not nearly as fun as I had hoped it could be…or it should have been.

Sound/Music/Score:
Its Star Wars god damn it!! What more do you need?? But yea, I had a lot of sound issues, it might be just me, it seems soft and almost lifeless.  I really needed to crank up the volume during the game and turn it down during the FMVs.

Overall:
Now whether you should pick up this game or not, I’ll leave it to you. But if you’ve never played this game, yes, pick it up. If you are not a Star Wars fan, you’ll still find it enjoyable, but might be a little frustrating. If you already own the game on one of the consoles, this is not worth picking up. Just download the DLCs and you’re not missing anything. Overall a good game with a flawed experience, but an awesome story line which will keep you engaged right through out. I would easily rate this one of the better Star Wars games…but not enough to make it the best.If you wondered why I’ve not reviewed this on other consoles. To be honest. Its the same. So you’re not reading anything entirely different that’s gonna happen on the Xbox 360 and the PS3

Release Info:
Available on:  Xbox 360, PS3, Mac and PC
Genre: Action
Release date: November 3rd 2009.
Published by: Aspyr
Developed by: LucasArts

System Requirements for PC
Our recommendation for the full experience:

• Core2Duo Extreme or Core2Quad
• 4870 or better
• 4gigs of ram
• Creative X-Fi series sound card

For the casual gamer:

• Core2Duo 2.8 GHz or better
• 4 gigs of ram
• 9600gt or better

Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City Review – Xbox 360

Summary
If you’ve enjoyed GTA 4, then be sure to pick up this awesome pack which has 2 distinct stories (The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony), new cars, weapons and great value for money! The best part – you don’t need the GTA 4 disc to play the game.
Good:

• Two very good distinct story lines
• Lots of new vehicles and weapons
• Introduced checkpoints, making failure less frustration
• Good value for money

Bad

• Graphics  engine is  starting to show its age
• Control system is still frustrating

Ugly:

• Separate Multiplayer Lobbies for GTA 4 and GTA 4 Episodes.

The Story
The Lost and the Dammed:

Johnny is a veteran member of The Lost, a notorious biker gang. Johnny has been creating business opportunities for The Lost in Liberty City, but his first loyalty must be to the patch he wears on his back and to Billy Grey, the club’s President. However, when Billy returns from rehab hell-bent on bloodshed and debauchery, Johnny finds himself in the middle of a vicious turf war with rival gangs for control of a city torn apart by violence and corruption. Can the brotherhood survive?

The Ballad of Gay Tony:

You take on the role of Luis Lopez who works for the title character. Where GTA IV star Niko Belic and Lost and Damned anti-hero Johnny Klebitz are men of little means attempting to rise up in the world, Luis has already made his transition from rags to riches. Tony Prince, owner of the biggest straight and gay nightclubs in Liberty City, took Luis under his wing and made him something. The Ballad of Gay Tony isn’t about living in squalor. You live well and you work for the richest men in the city.
Graphics
For both these games, graphics are nothing new. The old GTA 4 engine is starting to show its age, and things could have been improved to make it standout, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. There are claims that it does look better, but quite frankly the changes have been very minute compared to the severe issues that could have been addressed. But don’t get me wrong…it’s still a great looking game despite the old graphics engine and will put most modern games to shame.

Controls
The controls are very much the same as GTA 4, nothing new to add here. Some annoying camera angles still exist, but this can be attributed to not tweaking the graphics engine as well

Gameplay
This is where it truly shines…

The Lost and the Dammed:
While TLaD’s story offers up a look at the grungiest aspects of Liberty City’s already-seedy underworld, it also brings a raft of new gameplay features and improvements, not the least of which is the ability to stay on your bike if you suffer a minor collision. Throw in sidekicks who level up the more they’re used, a few new weapons and new, biker-centric multiplayer modes, and The Lost and Damned is a fun – if unrelentingly gloomy – romp through GTA’s even-rougher side.
Another neat feature introduced in TLaD, which also made it into The Ballad of Gay Tony, is a mission checkpoint system. Some of the missions take a long time to beat, and a good number of them involve riding or driving to locations that might be a good distance away before the action really gets under way. In GTAIV it could be frustrating to fail these missions, because doing so meant restarting them from the beginning, but the checkpoint system addresses that problem by giving you the option to restart from the last checkpoint that you made it through successfully.
Parachutes are perhaps the most obvious new feature introduced in The Ballad of Gay Tony, and while there aren’t many missions that use them, those that do are definitely some of the episode’s best. You can use parachutes outside of story missions as well, and the controls while falling are easy enough to grasp that you’ll be hitting the centers of targets, gliding through rings in the air, and landing on moving vehicles in base-jump challenges in no time. Other activities that you’re introduced to during Lopez’s never-a-dull-moment story include dancing and drinking minigames, hitting golf balls at a driving range, and competing in and betting on cage-fighting tournaments. You’re not likely to spend a whole lot of time with any of these optional activities, but they’re fun to check out once or twice, and they compare favorably to the arm wrestling, air hockey, and hi-lo-card games introduced in this offering.

The Ballad of Gay Tony:
The Ballad of Gay Tony is packed with weapons that give a big bang. Helicopters play a larger role, which is both good and bad. It’s certainly faster and easier to travel in a chopper and the new ones are stocked with weapons, but mid-air battles are still a challenge. There are a few missions that require you to do battle in the air and all are a challenge simply because it’s difficult to target enemies. The high-flying elements are a welcome part of the Gay Tony storyline, but they should have been refined. Fortunately, the majority of missions don’t focus on mid-air confrontations.
Luis has plenty of weapons to fulfill his missions, including the P90 assault SMG…and you get to romp around in a compact APC NOOSE tank. It’s built for policing metropolitan areas
Along with a bigger, badder, bolder attitude, The Ballad of Gay Tony includes some welcome additions. You receive a score at the end of every mission. Once you beat the game, you can replay any mission using your phone and attempt a higher score. There are also 15 base jumping challenges for those who missed doing silly stuff in a GTA game.

On top of this are 25 Drug Wars side quests. Your buddies from the old days, when you were a petty thug, need your help. They want to build a drug cartel but have no money. They plan to start their empire by stealing drugs from rival gangs. Each Drug Wars scenario gets progressively more difficult and hectic. It’s mindless fun — just the kind of fun I like. If fisticuffs is more your thing, you can join the fight club and take on other shirtless brawlers. It’s not as explosive as Drug Wars, but it’s another way to eat up some time.
The Lost and Damned has seven  and in addition to the requisite Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Race options, there are some really inventive ones. They include Chopper vs. Chopper, in which a player on a bike has to race through checkpoints while a player in a helicopter gunship tries to stop him, and Witness Protection, which casts one player as a bus driver that a team of police must protect from a team of bikers. Club Business is a lot of fun as well, since it lets you and up to seven other players play as a biker gang and complete missions cooperatively.
The Ballad of Gay Tony, on the other hand, has only four multiplayer modes, and they’re all enhanced versions of modes from GTAIV. The Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch modes benefit from the inclusion of new weapons like sticky bombs, an advanced sniper rifle, and an automatic shotgun with explosive rounds. Meanwhile, Race and GTA Race modes feature new street courses and now give every driver access to a nitrous tank that gradually refills after every boost. This multiplayer content can be a lot of fun if you get in with a good group of people. However, it can be tough to find people playing some of the modes, and it’s unfortunate that to move from one episode’s modes to the other’s you have to go back out to the main menu, load up the other episode, and access the multiplayer options from the in-game cell phone again. A single multiplayer lobby that combines content from GTAIV and both episodes would be much more convenient.

Sound/Music:
The sound is still great as ever and has definitely gone up a notch or two.  While we can continue to write endlessly on the new music added…take a look at the official site for the tracks.

Overall:
We would recommend you play TLaD before the Ballad of Gay Tony. Most people say that TLaD has a character that one couldn’t care about…but we disagree, as you get deeper into the game you’ll see how cool Johnny can really be and how he comes into his own as story unfurls. But yes, compared to GTA 4, it’s a better offering, as none of the bad stuff from GTA 4 made it into this.
The Ballad of Gay Tony is the perfect way to close out the GTA IV saga. Finally, we know what happened to the diamonds stolen in the main story a year-and-a-half ago. Though Luis Lopez doesn’t have much of a story at all (this is the ballad of his boss, after all), the supporting cast is phenomenal. There are a lot of hilarious moments and ludicrous missions that will please GTA fans. Sure, a few of the missions fall flat compared to the wild nature of others, but all-in-all this is  a great package

Release Info:
Available on:  Xbox 360
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Oct 29, 2009
Published by: Rockstar Games
Developed by: Rockstar North
Franchise: Grand Theft Auto
Multiplayer: Online 16 Player VS, Offline – 1 player solo.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 Review - Xbox 360

Coming right off 2006’s smash hit (mmm…’smash hit’ - wonder why no one uses that word anymore); Marvel Ultilmate Alliance 2 is a must have for any comic book fan! Even if you’re not :)…it’s packed with heroes and villains culled from the Marvel Universe, brims with button-tapping glee, and suffers from occasional and annoying technical idiosyncrasies. Its improvements to the formula can’t be ignored, however. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 is easier to look at and features an intriguing character dialogue component. It also ties the heroic crew together with a much more intriguing story based on the Marvel Civil War miniseries, though comic fans should note that it takes more than a few liberties with that narrative. This isn’t a groundbreaking game, but it’s an enjoyable and replayable one.

From an isometric camera view, you lead a team of four Marvel stars through hordes of expendable henchmen and glowering robots, occasionally taking detours to solve simple puzzles and bash on the villains standing between you and fist-pumping victory. You lead one hero at a time, while the AI and/or other players, online or off, control the other three. Regardless of which heroes and antiheroes from the roster of about two dozen you choose to take along, they can all string two types of melee attacks into combos, grab various objects and enemies to throw around, and perform four superpowers limited only by a quick-recharging power meter. While each controls more or less the same, there’s a good amount of variety among the heroes. Storm can fly and knock down multiple foes at a time with a gust of wind; Venom’s tongue can lash about, doing damage to any nearby enemies; and Iceman can call forth an eruption of ice to impale villains from underneath. Whether you’re on your own or with buddies, the action is good, laid-back fun.

However, not all the characters are created equal. They’re all fairly balanced, but that doesn’t make them all correspondingly fun to play. The Invisible Woman’s debuffs can be helpful, but she’s not as viscerally appealing as Wolverine, with his dramatic clawing, or Deadpool, whose well-rounded powerset and self-referential one-liners make him consistently satisfying to use. However, ceaseless button mashing can make even the best characters tiresome, especially once you’ve discovered effective patterns that you can keep spamming again and again. Fortunately, you can change easily to another character not controlled by another player and switch unlocked heroes in and out of your active crew on the fly. If you’re on your own, you’ll be pleased to know that the AI often does a good enough job of taking care of the characters not in your control, using powers frequently and choosing enemies wisely. That isn’t always the case, though. Every so often, you’ll glimpse AI-driven heroes wandering about but contributing nothing to the chaos, and as in the first game, they might get stuck on objects or stutter about in an animation loop until they break free.

The most notable additions to the action are fusion powers. As you damage enemies, you fill up a fusion meter, and once it’s charged up, you can initiate a two-hero fusion attack. There are several types of attacks, depending on the two heroes involved in the fusion. Guided attacks, like the fire-and-ice beam created by Iceman and the Human Torch, let you maneuver the pair about the screen, zapping any foes unlucky enough to get caught in their elemental stream. Clearing attacks, appropriately, clear the immediate area of baddies, such as the laser deflection that Iron Man and Captain America perform. Different fusions come in handy at different times, but many of them are absolutely fantastic to watch, like any of those featuring Storm’s whirlwind. Various combinations of heroes don’t all make for singular fusions, however. Storm-plus-Gambit is essentially the same fusion as Storm-plus-Spiderman–one throws cards into the cyclone, while one spews webbing into it. The repetition among fusions is disappointing, especially if you tend to stick to the same one or two characters, but fusions are probably the best part of the game: most look fantastic and colorful, they do a lot of damage, and you don’t have to be stingy with them.

The story that gives context to all this action is based on two Marvel storylines: author Mark Millar’s Civil War comics event and Brian Michael Bendis’ Secret War. The narrative doesn’t closely follow those plot outlines, but Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2’s version is intriguing, and its tale of superheroes divided over the US government’s attempt to force heroes into legally registering has provocative political and social undertones. It also forces you into an eventual decision that doesn’t just divide your hero roster, but divides the entire game into two separate story experiences before bringing them back together again. It’s a clever method of storytelling that gives you a reason to replay the game again once you’ve finished the first time, just to see how it plays out if you make the other choice.

Your involvement with the story isn’t limited to making a single decision, however. Throughout the game, you’ll engage in dialogue with various characters and choose one of three different responses to their statements: aggressive, defensive, and diplomatic. Consistent responses lead to in-game rewards like team medals (more on these to come), though their contribution to the story is disappointingly negligible. The response options often don’t fit their category; sometimes, each choice seems equally smarmy (every option might seems like it should have been categorized as “passive-aggressive”). And because the dialogue is based on the situation and not necessarily tailored to the character you’re controlling, your choices may not seem completely appropriate. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself thinking, “Come on–Venom would never say that!”

As you hack and slash your way through Latveria, the Negative Zone, and other locales, you’ll level up and earn team medals, so there are several ways to customize your roster. Customization is a bit more streamlined in the sequel than in the original. For example, you no longer find and equip gear as you did in the original, and you’re limited to equipping team-wide medals that may add cold damage to your melee attacks or increase the number of experience orbs you earn. It’s disappointing to see the role-playing elements of the original stripped down in such a way; after all, finding more loot is an addictive part of similar games, and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 doesn’t seem to benefit in any way from this change. As before, you can let the game handle all the leveling for you and never worry about spending experience orbs and skill points if you don’t want to. Sadly, if you prefer to micromanage your heroes, you might get exasperated with a glitch that constantly resets the autoleveling option back to on, even after you turn it off. Other elements of the game have been smoothed out for the better. The menus are easier to navigate, and the addition of a navigation arrow means you’ll rarely lose your way. And in the most convenient and slick addition of all, should an online buddy wish to upgrade his hero, he can do so without pausing the game for everyone: the AI will simply take over for him until he returns.

The visuals have also been noticeably smoothed out. Environments are attractive and you’ll traverse a nicer variety of locations than in the first Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. There are still too many sterile interiors, but outdoor regions look terrific and colorful. Power effects are snazzy, filling the screen with bolts of electricity and bursts of fire. Character models also look better and, in most cases, seem true to their familiar comic book design. However, both the visuals and the sound design are still exasperatingly uneven. In the character select screen, the heroes look great; during conversations, they look stiff and occasionally bizarre, and the camera might give you a view of their internal geometry. The frame rate can’t always handle the excess of particles and explosions; it takes noticeable dips here and there, especially when you’re playing online. The inconsistency holds true for the voice acting as well, which is at times right on point (Deadpool was apparently a developer favorite; be sure to listen closely to the closing credits) and at other times laughably campy. The soundtrack and audio effects are rousing and boisterous, qualities perfectly consistent with the subject matter.

There’s a lot of game packed onto this disc. Not only will the campaign last you around 15 hours or so, but the branching story gives you a good reason to return. Furthermore, there are additional stand-alone missions to take on, most of which are designed well and are enjoyable to tackle; a trivia game that will test your Marvel comics knowledge; and lots of costumes, audio discs, and dossiers to collect. So while Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 may not take the series in a big and bold new direction, or benefit from the kind of refinement you would look for in a sequel, it does deliver the button-mashing, power-flinging, over-the-top action fans of the original would expect. And it’s just good fun.

Batman: Arkham Asylum Review Xbox 360

After many many…yes…many years, we finally get a Batman game, that feels, like a Batman game. Arkham Asylym is one hell of a ride. Now, if you don’t read comics, it’s conceivable that you might be unfamiliar with Arkham Asylum. The iconic psychiatric hospital is essentially Gotham City’s Alcatraz, and it has housed just about every villain Batman has ever tangled with at one time or another.

With “Batman: Arkham Asylum,” players don’t just punch out relentless streams of henchman. RockSteady goes far beyond the stock beat-’em up and creates an experience that captures nearly every aspect of comics’ most complicated hero. Batman defeats squads of armed foes using stealth and smarts. He tracks down hostages by investigating crime scenes and spotting clues that will lead him to his objective. He even outsmarts murderers like Killer Croc and Harley Quinn (as always)

This dedication to the character, along with sizable contributions from the team behind “Batman: The Animated Series,” makes “Arkham Asylum” so special. Even more so, because Joker with the Voice of Mark Hamil and Kevin Conroy doing Batman’s voice was the icing on the cake for me.

Structurally, the game is set up like “Metroid Prime.” At first the Cape Crusader only has access to parts of the island. He can pull grates open and sneak through areas undetected. He can use his grappling hook gun to swing across gargoyles so that he can stalk armed criminals patrolling the grounds. He can knock them out temporarily with his batarang.

During the adventure, he’ll face huge boss fights and hordes of thugs. Winning these battles unlocks new equipment that opens up new routes and doors for Batman.

This is standard stuff for the genre, but “Arkham Asylum” melds this structure so well to the plot that you don’t even notice. The game just flows at an exquisite pace.

It makes sense for Batman to head to the Batmobile upon reaching the island surface. Getting the codes from the warden helps the Dark Knight unlock electric barriers that have blocked off areas of the game.

Another well-crafted element is the upgrade system. The game’s difficulty changes depending on how players improve Batman’s equipment. Often, the difference between breezing through a puzzle and struggling through it is picking the right upgrade at the right time. The feature provides a nonlinear element that also helps with the Riddler’s puzzles and trophies hidden through the world.

If you’re a fan of Batman comic books, you should feel very at home in Arkham Asylum. There are plenty of nods and winks to inmates who don’t actually appear in the game, and even some of the minor characters have neat backstories that are faithful to their previous, infrequent appearances in comics. You shouldn’t feel intimidated if you’re not that familiar with Batman, though, because the game does a great job of giving you all of the information you need, as well as plenty that you don’t. For example, taking the time to read prominent character Harley Quinn’s bio and listen to her patient interviews offers valuable insight into her motivations that might add to your enjoyment of the game, while unlockable information on such characters as Prometheus, Calendar Man, and Humpty Dumpty just adds a little flavor.

More significant unlockable content comes in the form of eight challenge maps, which come in regular and extreme difficulties for a total of 16. (24 on PS3 if you include the platform-exclusive free DLC option to play some of them as Joker, whose abilities are quite different to Batman’s). The maps are based on areas that you visit in the Story mode, and the challenges are split 50/50 between purely combat-oriented sequences and stealth-based “Predator” gameplay. In the former, you’re pitted against four increasingly tough waves of enemies and score points for performing combos, avoiding taking damage, executing ring outs, and using a variety of different moves. In the latter, you’re dropped into a level where every enemy has a gun and your goal is to take them all down as quickly as possible. The twist is that to earn a respectable position on the leaderboard in the Challenge mode, you also have to earn medals, and in order to do that, you have to deal with some of your enemies in very specific ways. During a stealth challenge, for example, earning the maximum possible three medals might require you to perform a silent takedown from behind and an inverted takedown, as well as pull an enemy down from a walkway while hanging from a ledge.

Regardless of whether you’re getting sucked into the Story mode or competing for high scores in the Challenge mode, Batman: Arkham Asylum does an outstanding job of letting you be Batman. Everything about this game–the impressive visuals, stirring soundtrack, superb voice acting, fiendish puzzles, hard-hitting combat–feels like it has been lovingly crafted by a development team that’s both knowledgeable and passionate about the source material. Miss out on this one and the joke’s on you Bat Boy!

Check out the image gallery below:

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra Review - xbox 360

The 1980’s animated series G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero famously featured a series of good-natured public service announcements. These PSAs taught youngsters safety lessons, like not to play with electrical wires and to be careful with campfires. They did not, however, tell you not to play G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, so if you need an official warning, let this be it: Don’t do it! Even in the realm of licensed tie-ins, this monotonous third-person action game is particularly poor, managing not only to screw up the mechanics it rips off from other games, but also failing to get even the basics right. An awful camera, atrocious vehicle sequences, and dreadful storytelling are just a few of the inhumanities you’ll face on this mission to spoil the latest scheme from the terrorist group Cobra. Local co-op play eases the tedium and frustrations, but even the closest of friends can’t rescue you from this snake’s venomous fangs. So now you know–and knowing is half the battle.

G.I. Joe borrows liberally from Contra and Gears of War. You and another Joe (controlled either by another player or the AI) run through a series of 3D environments, blasting everything in sight to earn points and occasionally taking cover and popping out to fire at the more resilient nasties. Bringing enemies down consists mostly of holding down a trigger to shoot and hitting a button to tumble or hide behind conspicuously placed barriers. There should have been fun here. With more than a dozen different characters to unlock and play, G.I. Joe could have delivered action enthusiasts some fast-paced gunplay, or amused franchise fans with a fun and entertaining story. Instead, you get ugly cutscenes, bad dialogue, and deadpan voice acting that expresses all the excitement of a long yawn. And the gameplay itself is not only sloppy and boring, but it fails to get a number of essentials right.

G.I. Joe’s fixed camera is the first example of a simple ingredient gone sour. You get absolutely no camera control. As you traverse the environments, approach downward slopes, and turn corners, the camera will swoop around to give you what is apparently intended to be a proper view of the proceedings. But it leads to disaster. You’ll be shot at from offscreen enemies, or have to run toward the camera, unable to see where you are going. When the camera view suddenly flips while you are moving, the controls often won’t adjust properly, so your Joe may go running off in some direction other than the one you intended. Plenty of games with fixed or semifixed cameras (think Devil May Cry) have managed these camera shifts properly; there’s no excuse for the issues here. Things become even more disastrous when you jump into any of the game’s slippery vehicles. You always push the stick forward to move the vehicle forward, but your view of the action may be from the side, from slightly above, or even from in front. And the camera will move about as you drive, forcing you to constantly rethink which direction you need to push the stick in to make the tank move in the direction you want it to go.

Another standard component done poorly: the targeting system. The Rise of Cobra selects a target for you automatically. You can switch targets using the right stick, but if you take cover and select any enemy other than the default target, the game will automatically switch your target back to the default if you don’t fire for a few seconds. Why? Who knows. The fact that you can fire at certain power-ups to reap their benefits only complicates matters. The game doesn’t distinguish among foes that can hurt you, buildings that cannot, and these score-enhancing cubes. Thus, you’ll be surrounded by Cobra grunts but firing at some offscreen power-up because the game can’t prioritize a dude with a gun over a harmless cube hovering in the air. When an enemy does fall, the targeting may not lock on to nearby foes because they are behind you–which happens often, given the rotten camera. If you play on the middle or upper difficulty level, you may die once or twice, almost always because of the awful camera or the awful targeting.

The bits stolen from–er, inspired by–Gears of War don’t fare much better because they don’t feel right in this context. For example, a single button sticks you behind cover, but it also makes you tumble. Given that the action is generally quick and the camera view is constantly changing, the one-button-does-all approach might cause you to take cover when you want to roll and roll when you want to take cover. Or you’ll take cover on the opposite side of an obstacle, thereby turning your back to the enemy and proving that cover systems like this only work when the player is always viewing his or her character from behind. These oddities make battles feel loose and messy, though the game still manages to scatter in a few moments of fun anyway. When you get room to move about and don’t need to worry about cover all that much, the simple action isn’t notable, but it’s decent in small doses. The action kicks up a notch for boss fights, but the rampant invisible walls and predictable mechanics knock it back down a few pegs.

In addition to a basic melee attack and a basic ranged attack, each character can perform a special attack or skill, and some of these are amusing to unleash. Unfortunately, some of these abilities are also imbalanced. Ripcord’s turret-laying ability, for example, will make mincemeat of standard enemies and minibosses. And speaking of imbalances, if you are playing with AI teammates, you’ll want to take Gung-Ho along. The friendly AI is invincible but does very little damage, no matter whom you take along. However, Gung-Ho’s missiles will knock enemies down, which is a lot more helpful than an AI-controlled Joe that just soaks up damage. Things pick up a bit when you replace the AI with another player. Your AI teammate doesn’t really take cover in competent ways or try to avoid fire, but it doesn’t matter because he can’t die anyway. At least with another player, you can coordinate attacks and try to steal power-ups from each other in hopes of getting the higher score. You’ll want to stick close together, though, because the camera may get hung up if you veer too far apart.

The most enjoyable moments Rise of the Cobra offers are those that involve the accelerator suit. Every so often, you can temporarily activate this parka of power, which makes you invincible and lets you move about with blazing speed and do lots of damage. More single-button double duty may cause you to activate the suit by accident (the same button opens doors and activates computer terminals). But assuming you mean to use the suit, you’ll probably get a bit of glee from the results, if not from the great power you wield, then from the tacky, awesome music that you trigger. That vigorous short theme is the one aspect of the game that gets the G.I Joe vibe right; it’s too bad that the rest of the sound design doesn’t follow suit. The soundtrack is fine; the sound effects, however, range from mediocre to outright terrible. The tinny din of the weapons is enough to make you reach for something spongy to shove in your ears, and other sound effects don’t sound right at all. For example, when you break open crates, the flying debris sounds more like the whirring of a computer in a bad 1960’s sci-fi movie than ricocheting rubbish.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is full of things that make you go “hmm.” Why do midlevel checkpoints update your score but not save your game, forcing you to restart from the beginning if both characters die? If you’re going to steal from Gears of War, why steal the slow-walking, earpiece-cradling mission updates? The game isn’t all bad; there are a few moments of fun to be had with the simple combat system. But G.I. Joe doesn’t do much beyond the fundamentals, and sadly, it gets very few of them right.