Yo Joe! Electronic Arts serves up a below average adaptation of the recent Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Entertainment film G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra. While the film cranks up the action to 150 degrees, the video game stalls at the starting line. Even with rich history of the toy line from Hasbro and three animated television shows to draw inspiration from, G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra video game is a huge let down for fans and non-fans alike. Maybe if this title was released 15 years ago it would’ve been appreciated, but with today’s high standards, it doesn’t do a great job at entertaining its targeted demographics. The gameplay is straightforward and linear – gamers will shoot everything in their path without a blink of an eye.
Due to the monotonous gameplay of fighting the same enemies and finishing them in the same fashion over and over again, G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra is similar to Contra in the action department but without the addiction. Running the length of seven to nine hours, the campaign is very cut and dry to the point that players will want to put their controllers down and turn off their console. One of its main faults is the poor level design and repetition in environments thrown at the player. Lacking that special flavor to have it stick out, the level design is borderline amateur night at the local comedy theatre. Players will encounter the typical assortment of: artic levels, jungles, deserts and the like. On top of that, the character design isn’t anything special, but to the credit of the developers, that’s not their fault – they follow the film faithfully as they could.
At least players have the eligibility to play as different characters – that has to be a positive, right? Well depending on how gamers like to play their games, it’s dependent on the difficulty they like to play. If gamers enjoy the harder difficulties, many of their heroes that fall in combat will stay dead. If they enjoy games played on the easier side of things, their dead characters will respawn in a matter of moments. As expected, each character has a unique weapon and special attack to utilize. There are 12 G.I. Joe’s to play as and four playable Cobra villains, so for fans of the series, they’ll have many options for their selectable characters.
In addition, there are collectibles found all throughout the level and offline cooperative mode. Finding the hidden collectibles isn’t essential to advancing through the storyline and the cooperative mode is on the level of typicality. In even worse news, there’s no online cooperative, so if players can’t trick or force their friends of family to play with them offline, then they have no option to play with strangers online. At least EA took their time to add in well-known G.I. Joe vehicles to appease the fans who feel betrayed by the film and/or the video game. The only issue with the vehicles is that they don’t control extremely well and the camera is unforgiving.
At this current point in time, gamers may be wondering if there’s any reason to go out and buy G.I. Joe – well, the simple answer is that there is no reason to buy the game. The game is a much better rental or title that is best left to borrowing from a friend who was fooled into buying it due to their ‘80’s nostalgia. I can only cross my fingers that EA creates a new G.I. Joe title in the future that has no connection to the film. If this was to occur, then, and only then, the Real American Heroes can be represented in the video game medium without any issues of having to stay true to the film franchise.
