GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra

I have to confess, I never was the biggest GI Joe fan... I was more of a Transformers boy myself. Sure, I watched the GI Joe cartoon, but I never owned any of the toys and most of my memories are from the animated movie. But if you were or still are a huge GI Joe fan, there's a lot in this game for you. If you're not... well, that's a different story.

GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra takes place after the events of the movie... but don't worry, playing through the game first ruins absolutely nothing from the movie. If you're planning on using that as an excuse to not play the game, there are actually many many more valid reasons to not play the game. But we'll get to those later. The game itself is a third person shooter where you choose two Joes to go on various missions (played either cooperatively with another person or with an AI-controlled partner) to shoot... stuff. There are four different locations made up of anywhere from four to six missions a piece but the missions all feel the same. Sure, choosing different characters allows you to employ slightly different strategies, but it all boils down to holding the shoot button and dodging incoming fire.

Perhaps the worst offender in the game is the camera. In short, it blows. I understand the use of a static camera because of thee two player co-op play, but the camera in GI Joe is horrendous. More often than not, it will take a good few seconds for the camera to adjust so that you can see what you're shooting at. And those precious few seconds could mean the difference between moving on and being killed and having to start the mission all over again. You see, if one of your characters dies, they won't be revived until the next checkpoint. If both of your characters dies, then it's back to the beginning of the mission for you! I'm not sure why they call them "checkpoints" to begin with if you can't actually start from those "checkpoints".

Slightly less worse are the graphics. The characters are tiny. In two player co-op, I often lost track of my character in the chaos which would end up getting me killed. There are a few sequences (mostly cutscenes) where you can see the characters up close, but it doesn't really make them look any better. The lighting on the faces makes it look like the Joes went 10 rounds with Mike Tyson before heading to the arctic to fight Cobra.

For those of you who are GI Joe fans, there are a lot of little things that you'll probably enjoy. There are a lot of nods to the original cartoon, from the vehicles to the unlockable characters (Shipwreck's special attack with his parrot is kind of hilarious) to the theme song that's played when you deploy the accelerator suits. Even the gameplay reminds me of the original GI Joe arcade game (although that was less frustrating but only because you could only play it minutes at a time). You also get to unlock some of the original public service announcements that were attached to the original cartoon.

Rating

The camera is bad, the gameplay is frustrating and the game is short. The last of those three is probably the best thing about the game... but only because the first two things are so bad.

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