Make no mistake, Captain America isn't a special movie-liscenced game. It's just another run-off-the-mill movie tie.in.
What really encouraged me to do so? The fact that i've been creeping around the Captain America forums for a couple of days before it's purchase. I've been reading continuously about how overly optimistic people were about this game, calling it '' the next Wolverine Origins ''.
Let's be honest, Wolverine was a good action game, but you'd have to lower your standards a bit. It dragged on, had lame bosses, and the character progression was stiff. Still, there's no denying that this game was hell of a good fun.
So, here I am, putting the Captain America disk in the tray of my 360 and booting it up. An hour later, I shutdown the console, chuckling at how bad this game is. It took me 4hours and 33 minutes to beat the game on Avenger difficulty ( Hard ). So right off the bat, the replay value is supreme horse-dung. Yes, there are challenges, but they're vastle uninteresting, to be honest.
How was my experience? Well, the gameplay itself was below average. The controls are sloppy and the real culprit here is the dreadfully unstable framerate that poisons your experience 70% of the time. Button inputs won't always register, but you can usually mash your way out by doing some acrobatics out of the way.
The combat itself has some highlights ; and by that, I mean only the special finishers you can unleash. They're brutal, and the impact is often dead-on, giving you the feeling of really packing something behind your punches. These special attacks can be unleashed on everything ; bosses, large enemies and grunts, which is quite cool, since it's not very common to be able to abuse of your godly moves on bosses.
That said, the game tries to mimic Arkham Asylum, minus a year of development and polishing. It's crude, weirdly executed and doesn't flows very well. The fault right there is the protagonist's posture. Usually, the main character adopts different ways of moving around when in combat, to facilitate its maneuvers and give more precision. Unfortunately, that's not the case here, so Cap runs around in a jogging pace even in a crowd of dudes, making his movements imprecise and combersome. It also means that this game suffers from a case of '' bad character behavior''. What I mean by this is that you'll constantly have to line-up your character in the right way to initiate context-sensitive actions.
You'll also be treated with weird platforming sequences, which are heavily automated. They aren't bad, but they're far from being entertaining. Often, I found myself having to launch myself off-screen, for the camera refused to show me the correct way. For platforming sequences, it's crucial to give the player a proper angle of where he's going and that's not the case with this game.
Then, there's the boss fights. There's a couple of these encounters throughout the game, and while they're nothing special, I appreciated the fact that I could unleash my special finishers on them at anytime, making those fights a lot more cooler to look at than they should have been. Still, the bosses are one of the two mere qualities of this game.
The graphics are rather bad and outdated. I kept thinking that this game would have been a looker in 2006, but as of now, the only thing that stands out are the daily skies and the shield of Captain America. The game has bad explosions effects, drab textures and a overall bland look. If only it ran well, it wouldn't have been a problem, but the game never has a solid 30 FPS. It's always jittering.
The voice overs aren't really convincing, especially the main character. Or maybe is it just that Captain America himself is completely boring and a by-the-book goody-two-shoe with a monotone voice? The not-nazis Hydras are a bit more convincing, trying their best to sound evil straight up from our beloved 90's morning cartoons.
At one point in this game, they'll give you an achievement that's worth 12 points, if I remember correctly. TWELVE. It had just destroyed my perfect achievement score that always ended with fives or zeros. Scrolling down the achievement list, I found that I had to sit through the credits to gain the 8 missing points. I see what you did there, Next Level Games. And that was a low-ball move.
Stupid as I am, I thought I had to beat the game to see the credits, so I trekked on until the endgame to regain my points, but I only realised afterwards that I could have booted the credits from the extras in the menu. Shame on me.
I'll be honest, if it wasn't for those 12 points ( if my memory isn't playing tricks on me ) I wouldn't have completed this game. It's dull, repetitive and it has an absurd ammount of collectibles. Actually, i've never seen so many ill-placed collectibles in a videogame before. It's just nuts. Just turn the camera to the left and there's 60% chance to have a ceramic egg or some secret dossiers lying on a table.
I can't help but chuckle at the poor employees who were tasked to scatter the collectibles around the game. They must have laughed about it themselves. More than 150 things to collect in a 4 hours long game is quite something.
Should you play Captain America? Well, if you set your standards on the fact that it's just another movie tie-in, you'll have fun for an hour or two. But this is not a purchase, nor a keeper.
Still, I know my review as been quite negative, but really, there's so very few positive points about this game, to be quite honest. I still give a thumbs up to Next Level Games who were tasked to rush a movie game. They still managed to carve up an action platformer with a fighting system that could have been quite decent if polished a bit more.
Actually, that's the best thing I can say about this game; if Next Level Games had more time, it could have been quite solid. There are obviously talented people behind the wheels of this game, but as with anything, if you get a product out way too soon, you'll always get bad results.
You're bound to forget about this game as soon as it's out of your console.
Verdict : Rent or Pass.