Bourne Conspiracy Review

Being a fan of the Robert Ludlums Bourne series, I was very interested to see a Bourne game out. Now, movie games are usually not very good. Actually, there are few examples of good movie games and Bourne Conspiracy is no exception.

The game starts a few days before where the first movie begins. Here you are creeping around the docks trying to get to the boat where your target is. To get there, your going to have to battle a few nameless henchmen, and well, that's about it.

Controlling Bourne is not always the easiest task. He is a big guy and there are narrow passage ways. Combined, you get one headache after another when your trying to run and you keep running into walls. Even the slightest clip on a wall will have you running in one spot like a 1980's treadmill. Taking cover behind walls is not always very effective, nor is it an easy task. The game using the unreal 3 engine, tries to give us a very Gears of War cover system, only not as effective. Think of it as how TMNT used Ubisofts Prince Of Persia engine.

The shooting in the game is also clunky and hard to master. Again, using the unreal 3engine, the game uses the pop out, over the shoulder technique. And like the cover system, it fails. Getting a headshot is more difficult than getting Gary Busey to make sense when talking about anything. Now on to maybe the games only saving grace, the fighting.



The fighting system is very basic and repetitive. You combine strong and weak attacks to create combos. At first, it's a lot of fun, but after doing it 30 times, you just wanna turn the game off. The animations are very predictable, so blocking is very simple, and all the enemies do the same moves. Hell, this game even has one of my major pet peeves in games, repetitive character models. You beat generic guy with wrench about 15 times in one mission.

There are moments in the game that had me saying "F#@#ing Awesome". Those were the moments where you build enough adrenaline, gained by defeating enemies to trigger take down sequences. These are instant kills on enemies where you smash their head into a wall or break their fingers. These are very useful on bosses, which like the fighting, just falls short of cool.



Overall, if your a fan of the Bourne series than I would recommend you RENT the game. It follows the story line and throws in alot of filler. Other than that, I would not recommend it to anyone else. The repetitive gameplay and lack of depth keep this from living up to the coolness that is Jason Bourne.