At least it’s better than Will Smith’s rapping Review

At least it’s better than Will Smith’s rapping

Men in Black: The Game is really nothing special. It is a game whose success will mainly come from the fact that it was licensed off of a major movie production. The game, in and of itself, has a few good points, but is really nothing to get excited about. It incorporates pretty good graphics, a few basic puzzles, and a story that most of the consumers are familiar with.

Men in Black: The Game

assumes that most if not all of its players are familiar with Men in Black:

The Movie. Thus, no real story is presented. The game starts off as James

Edwards (you) investigate a possible burglary. Here you end up chasing a person

with non-human characteristics while fighting some random thugs on the way.

In the end, after a cheesy comic-book-style cut-scene, you find yourself to

be the new Agent J, one of the “Men in Black”. The game can be divided up into

4 sections: New York City, just described, an Arctic Weather station, an Amazon

mining town, and finally a private estate in the Pacific Northwest. For each

of these missions, you can choose to be Agent J (James Edwards/Will Smith) Agent

K (Tommy Lee Jones) or Agent L (the female). You can also equip your self with

a number of weapons including your fist, the basic sidearm MiB gun, the noisy

cricket, the series 4 de-atomizer, the pulsar blaster, the pulsar arm cannon,

the reverberating cannon, and the neuralizer.

In-game graphics look decent enough to pass. Basically, a player walks around

in a world, which has preset camera angles similar to Resident

Evil and Ecstatica I & II. All backgrounds are bitmapped images,

which look pretty good, while players, enemies and all other moving objects

are polygonal. Because the backgrounds are all pre-rendered, more time can be

spent rendering these 3D objects. Therefore, these characters have a high polygon

count and good texture maps, making them easily recognizable as their movie

counterparts. In other words, from the start I could recognize Will Smith as

Will Smith, not some polygonal mystery with the shape of a person.

The movement of these characters and enemies is a different story. Many animations

like running, punching and kicking look a tad on the foolish side. The same

goes for enemies, especially when fighting. The intelligence of most enemies

when fighting is pretty basic; they do the same movement over and over when

fighting, therefore it is REALLY easy to win fights.

Unlike the in-game graphics, all pre-game graphics are horrible. All menus, and loading screens have an extremely simple, bold, solid-color font…I’m surprised they didn’t just use the system font. The bottom line is that I could have made a better interface given Photoshop and about a day.

Playing the game is similar to Ecstatica. The directional keys move the forward and back and rotate the player left and right. Pushing -control- and a direction makes the player jump in that direction. Pushing-alt- and a direction makes the player execute a fighting move and fire a gun, depending on whether he/she is holding a gun. The actual “playing” of the game incorporates walking around levels, killing enemies, and solving puzzles. These puzzles vary from simple clicking on objects, to opening/unlocking doors, finding keys etc. Because the game has a strict path that must be followed, puzzles cannot be solved out of order. At times this could leave you stuck at one puzzle for hours thinking to yourself, “Now what the HELL am I supposed to do?”

Overall, Men in Black is an average game and will get most of its fame simply from the name. By comparing all the Men in Black products, I have come up with the following mathematical inequality:

Men in Black: The Movie > Men in Black: the Game > Men in Black: The Clothes > Men in Black the Collectable Figurines > 0 > Men in Black the Song

There will be a short quiz next period.