G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra Review

More like G.I. NO!

Let’s get the important part out of the way first: This game is awful. I’ll expand on that in just a minute, but if you are considering a purchase, DON'T. It’s worse than the movie, if only because you have to participate in the crappiness.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s dissect G.I. Joe’s undeniable shittiness. It’s an overhead style shooter in the vein of Smash TV, with guns that have the same capacity for ammunition as the ones you get in Contra but only half as great. And a Gears of War-style cover system of hiding behind the nearest wall like a pussy (Really... what kind of Real American Hero hides when shit gets hectic?). Worst, its story is actually worse than the shitty plot of the lousy movie it’s based on. I know that’s been mentioned already, but there isn’t much else to say.

G.I. Joe feels less like a full game and more like a game you would unlock after beating the actual game. For the first level or so, I was waiting for the real game to get moving and leave this unfinished arcade knock-off in the dust for something more complete.

Alright, alright, the core gameplay is at least functional. You shoot your guns and the baddies die eventually, though why it takes 30+ bullets to kill a normal baddie is beyond me. Cover is destructible, so staying put will result in an early grave, though dying has no significant consequence. Whenever you “die”, you switch to controlling your A.I. partner until your dopey ass respawns, which only takes about five seconds. Since dying has virtually no penalty, advancing through the game isn’t so much a matter of skill as it is a question of how much monotony one can endure. There’s local co-op, but no online mode, which is just as well since I can only hope that hardly anyone bought this. With game as lousy as it is, the local multiplayer is about as good as it can be.

There are twelve different types of G.I. Jerks to choose from so you get a little variety within the blandness. You can play as Snake Eyes, but that’s hardly a reason to shell out $50. There is also this stupid mechanic where at a certain point in combat you can activate your accelerator suits, which makes you invulnerable for a brief period while wielding massive guns that all have ridiculous firepower. What makes this stupid is exactly when it becomes available. Your little “go ape-shit” meter fills up with time and by taking damage; but it only ever seems to be full when a fight is almost over, leaving you with only one or two baddies to kill, a single shot each, as you waste the rest of your super-power time trying to get to the next encounter so it doesn’t all go to waste.

(I’ve been asked to mention the G.I. Joe game for the NES and now that it’s been mentioned, there’s no need to dwell on it.)

The graphics are… well… shitty. There isn’t a nice way to say it. They hardly even belong in the PS2 era. In fact, I take back what I said earlier about its similarities to Contra, Smash TV, and Gears of War, because it really doesn’t deserve to be compared to any good games. After seeing what the average XBLA game looks like, releasing a game that looks this bland and unfinished should get you fired… out of a cannon.

When this showed up at the GR office, I was admittedly excited. “Great!” I thought, “Another movie tie-in to surprise the world!” I mean, X-Men Origins: Wolverine was great, The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena could have been fucking awful given the source material but wasn't, and hell, Wanted: Weapons of Fate was head and shoulders above all expectations.

But such was not to be with G.I. Joe. The shooty stuff is okay, the cover is fine, the difficulty is all but nonexistent given your inability to die, but the worst part of all of this, the real slap in the face, is that it costs FIFTY !@#$ING DOLLARS. If this had been like 400 Microsoft points (or even less, really) or a free download, it would have been a nice little incentive, but EA in their infinite wisdom have deemed it necessary to charge you for this sub-par mediocrity . No, I’m being unfair, sub-par mediocrity would have been better than this suckfest.