Natural Bourne Killer
The Bourne Conspiracy is so damned close to being a good game it's a shame. Find out why inside.
Published: June 23, 2008
There are plenty of things about The Bourne Conspiracy that buck tradition. It's a licensed game that not only manages to do the movies justice, but it's plenty of fun in its own right. It's an Unreal Engine 3-based game that not only looks different from most of the other UE3-powered games on the system, but for the most part it runs well too. It even blends hand-to-hand combat and shooting elements in a way that, for a time, almost seems more compelling than current PS3 king of the hill Uncharted.
Unfortunately, for every moment where it seems like the game might fall into an enjoyable groove, something comes along to mess it up. The combat, initially an easy-to-understand mix of just a light and strong attack, a block and the all-important takedown button (more on that in a second), starts to feel disconnected and impotent against some of the late-game bosses. The shooting segments and regenerating life bar make it rather fun to experiment with headshots, and the AI for enemies is generally very, very solid, but a clunky snap-to-cover system can lead to frustrating bouts of button mashing. The driving section... well, okay, that was just a bad idea from the start. Even the Die Hard Arcade-like quick button press segments get a little repetitive toward the end -- particularly during fights.
It's obvious that developer High Moon Studios liked the movies and Robert Ludlum novel, because there's a keen attention to detail in replicating the set pieces and narrative with enough love that it doesn't quite all feel like a bunch of strung-together recreations. You won't really get much of the character development that you saw in the source material, but then again by now you should hopefully know how everything plays out. Most major moments from the first movie are intercut with game-exclusive flashback missions that almost always end up being as entertaining as the stuff you already know.
Unfortunately, for all the cool shootouts and visceral takedowns during hand-to-hand combat (there are shooting ones too, but they're far more trite), the game tends to lean too heavily on the same basic mechanics throughout, and once you start getting to the latter bosses, stuck mindlessly tapping combinations of Square and Triangle in the hopes of building up your Tackdown Meter enough to slam them into a wall or coffee table or desk, it threatens to drag the whole experience down.
A perfect example of this is the fight against The Professor in a burning barn after replicating the scene from the movie where Jason creates enough distractions to mask his approach against the sniper. That segment is fairly entertaining, but the subsequent shootout in the barn feels limp and the slugfest that results afterward (complete with a transition that bugged out so that The Professor was actually frozen in place trying to run into another part of the barn) is timed. Because the battles see-saw constantly, it turned an already frustrating fight into a segment that I had to replay needlessly only because I couldn't get on a run of ass kicking to allow me the necessary number of takedowns before the clock ran out.
It's a blight on what was an otherwise rather enjoyable (if simple) combat system. Yes, there were moments where getting too close to someone with a gun instantly dropped you into a fisticuffs tussle while all the other armed dudes would just happily sit back and blow you away, but by and large it was satisfying to slug it out with eerily competent private security people until such time as mashing their dome into a nearby copier ended the fight quickly.
Another big problem, though: getting stuck in those fights with people shooting at you usually meant dying, and that meant dealing with the game's perplexingly miniscule checkpoint system. One of the segments, the train station in particular, was incredibly annoying, requiring a good five or ten minutes of shooting, hand-to-hand and sniper dodges before another checkpoint would crop up. During this time, plenty of spawning enemies would appear from odd angles and shift the fight from shooting to melee at the worst time, creating a roadblock so frustrating that I didn't start up the game again for a couple of days. That the game regularly blocks off previous paths with doors that can't be re-opened just makes strategic retreats that much more difficult.
Unfortunately, for every moment where it seems like the game might fall into an enjoyable groove, something comes along to mess it up. The combat, initially an easy-to-understand mix of just a light and strong attack, a block and the all-important takedown button (more on that in a second), starts to feel disconnected and impotent against some of the late-game bosses. The shooting segments and regenerating life bar make it rather fun to experiment with headshots, and the AI for enemies is generally very, very solid, but a clunky snap-to-cover system can lead to frustrating bouts of button mashing. The driving section... well, okay, that was just a bad idea from the start. Even the Die Hard Arcade-like quick button press segments get a little repetitive toward the end -- particularly during fights.
It's obvious that developer High Moon Studios liked the movies and Robert Ludlum novel, because there's a keen attention to detail in replicating the set pieces and narrative with enough love that it doesn't quite all feel like a bunch of strung-together recreations. You won't really get much of the character development that you saw in the source material, but then again by now you should hopefully know how everything plays out. Most major moments from the first movie are intercut with game-exclusive flashback missions that almost always end up being as entertaining as the stuff you already know.
Unfortunately, for all the cool shootouts and visceral takedowns during hand-to-hand combat (there are shooting ones too, but they're far more trite), the game tends to lean too heavily on the same basic mechanics throughout, and once you start getting to the latter bosses, stuck mindlessly tapping combinations of Square and Triangle in the hopes of building up your Tackdown Meter enough to slam them into a wall or coffee table or desk, it threatens to drag the whole experience down.
A perfect example of this is the fight against The Professor in a burning barn after replicating the scene from the movie where Jason creates enough distractions to mask his approach against the sniper. That segment is fairly entertaining, but the subsequent shootout in the barn feels limp and the slugfest that results afterward (complete with a transition that bugged out so that The Professor was actually frozen in place trying to run into another part of the barn) is timed. Because the battles see-saw constantly, it turned an already frustrating fight into a segment that I had to replay needlessly only because I couldn't get on a run of ass kicking to allow me the necessary number of takedowns before the clock ran out.
It's a blight on what was an otherwise rather enjoyable (if simple) combat system. Yes, there were moments where getting too close to someone with a gun instantly dropped you into a fisticuffs tussle while all the other armed dudes would just happily sit back and blow you away, but by and large it was satisfying to slug it out with eerily competent private security people until such time as mashing their dome into a nearby copier ended the fight quickly.
Another big problem, though: getting stuck in those fights with people shooting at you usually meant dying, and that meant dealing with the game's perplexingly miniscule checkpoint system. One of the segments, the train station in particular, was incredibly annoying, requiring a good five or ten minutes of shooting, hand-to-hand and sniper dodges before another checkpoint would crop up. During this time, plenty of spawning enemies would appear from odd angles and shift the fight from shooting to melee at the worst time, creating a roadblock so frustrating that I didn't start up the game again for a couple of days. That the game regularly blocks off previous paths with doors that can't be re-opened just makes strategic retreats that much more difficult.
