G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra

Review from Cav, Cav, Cav, Cav, Cav and Cav - Tuesday, 06 October 2009 @ 7:36pm

Ever absolutely shit-can a game before you’ve even played it only to find out that it’s not that bad? Well hold onto that thought, because this isn’t one of those moments. With that in mind this going to be a terribly short, but oh so sweet review. If sweet equalled True that is.

This is either Power Rangers or a modern Spy vs Spy

So, is GI Joe: RotC, just another pathetic movie based game? Well when Hollywood goes and takes an icon from my childhood, puts it in a blender with a bunch of money hungry movie producers, the outcome is screwed from the get go. Lord knows this happened with Transformers. That wasn’t Optimus Prime, nor was that Megatron. Hell, even the gorgeous Elizabeth Montgomery turned in her grave when Will Farrell and Nicole Kidman made a mockery of Elizabeth and Darrin in a film based on the remake of Bewitched…. So really, who is to blame if the game is terrible. Remember you can get a diamond from a lump of coal, but you’d be hard pressed getting a diamond from a lump of shit.

I tell you now, I haven’t rinsed and repeated so often since before I gave up the receding hair fight and took a number one blade hair trimmer to my head. GI Joe is so repetitive, I just wanted to tape down the fire button on my Wii Classic Controller (I was actually amazed that this control option was available) and just control the character with my toes while I played a different game on my Nintendo DS. It pretty much goes something like this:

Move – Shoot – Collect

Move – Shoot – Collect

Ooohh look! Yet ANOTHER Tower to destroy

Listen to drab script

Earn another character

Wax On

Wax Off.

Yawn

Big score font. More important than big script font.

And that, my friends, was about it, I kid you not. To top it off the voice acting was rather flat, the environments were of a PS2 game standard. There were not real differences in the characters abilities. On numerous occasions you find yourself firing at enemies who were off screen; and if that was happening you couldn’t tell if the enemy was dead until you took your finger off the trigger to see if there was any return fire. It was just a big old waste of time and a terrible attempt to cash in on a movie, which from all reports was tripe in the first place.

The thing that has upset me the most is that the game (not to mention the movie) is missing an Icon; the very first real human being to have an action figure based on him. Those who know me (and those who are as old as me) will tell you it is Sgt Slaughter. Fans of the WWE in the 80s will know exactly who I mean. This game really needs the grumbling tones of Rob Remus yelling ‘MOVE IT YOU FILTHY MAGGOTS’ if it is to have any real credibility on a GI Joe scale.

The man behind the MAGGOTS!

So was there anything that I liked about the game. Being the nostalgic old bastard that I am, I did dig the facts that popped up during the loading screens such as the first GI Joe Action Figure was released in some year which I will now state was well before 97.84% of the people who read this review were born. Controls weren’t too bad, but that was using the Wii Classic Control. As a dedicated reviewer for Australian Gamer I possibly should have attempted the game with another control style, but I couldn’t bring myself to go thru the pain of playing the game again.

Pros

The Classic Control option is available - Fair bit to unlock - Actually being a co-op game

Cons

Repetitive, very repetitive - Poor Graphics - Poor voice acting - Very little difference within the characters