Using the shadows, Jackie can summon a number of demon tentacles from his back. After a time, you gain more powers, fight bad guys, cross into the demon world (why? not so sure) then finally face Uncle Paulie’s minions and himself.
OK, more summary than I wanted. Needless to say, this is actually quite a fun (and pretty long, if you do all the side missions) game. Some of the most fun I had was to use the demon arm, a sharp, stabbing tentacle, to impale enemies and toss them into the air. Ah, impaling enemies. There’s also an impossibly overpowered black hole ability, which simply sucks any unlucky bastage off their feet and around in the air for a while, apparently scaring them to death. Use, recharge, rinse, repeat.
Jackie is dark, moody and has no redeeming values whatsoever. Go forth, my child, and kill. The plot leaves a bit to be desired – standard revenge story, really – but it’s enough to justify all the killing. And did I mention there’s a lot of killing?
Basically, you play Bourne from the movie “The Bourne Identity,” but you are not Matt Damon. Follow me on this one. The game follows the events of the movie with additional scenes/missions acting as flashbacks, as if Bourne remembers his previous life in flashes, and you play out the memories.
It is not a bad convention, and would make for an interesting story and game if it weren’t for a few major annoyances.
First, it’s short. Absurdedly short. I started this on a Tuesday and finished it Wednesday. And I work for a living. It was probably about 5-7 hours total gameplay, which is starting to be close to “standard” for action games, but with no multiplayer and no replayability, that’s just unacceptable for a top license game that costs $60. I’m sure it’s longer on higher difficulties, but only because you would die more. (Good thing I Gamefly’d it.)
When you get into hand-to-hand, you are locked into one opponent at a time. And you can’t get out until he’s dead. It’s fun to fight like Bourne, but there is a limited attack set, and it just devolves into a formulaic button-mashing until you fill an “adrenaline bar” and can do a “takedown”, which basically is just a theatrical “find-the-closest-object-and-jam-it-in-their-throat” kind of move, which you don’t control.
Bottom line? It’s kind of boring, in retrospect. I wanted more. I wanted to be more free in my combat moves. I wanted to control the “takedowns”, and I wanted to be able to be more mobile in the fight structure and even, heck, pull out my pistol and execute someone once in a while.
The last thing I’ll mention is the context-buttons. This is the worst gaming convention ever, and should be done away with. During cutscenes and even mid-action at times, a context button pops up and requires you to vigilantly mash it in miliseconds or else the scene fails and you must restart at a checkpoint. There’s no “Choose Your Own Adventure” aspect to this, allowing you to recover from mistakes, or choose one route over the other, it’s essentially a movie that you can’t really watch because your eyes are riveted on the bottom of the scene, waiting for the next button to appear.
Stop this. Stop it! Stop it! This would be like watching Star Wars and then being required to push a button on your remote when Luke fires his torpedoes. If you failed to hit it in time, you would have to watch the entire trench scene again just to get back to that spot. Fuck me.
So, big disappointment, Bourne. Now I have to wait for 2010.