Review: The Bourne Conspiracy (PS3)

This adaptation of the first movie/book is very much holding your hand from beginning to end. Go from one end of the level to the other, beating up a variety of bad guys, pull off a few irritating quick time events, an obligatory shooting section. Oh, and they’ve thrown in an abysmal car chase section. In trying to make this feel like part of the Bourne universe they’ve thrown everything into the game including the kitchen sink and, while some elements are good, none of them are spectacular.

Starting with the good, the hand to hand fights are surprisingly well done, really capturing the brutal nature of the fights from the film series. You have your basic strong and weak attacks, a kick move and a block. On top of this you’ve been given an adrenaline meter. Once a section gets filled then by pressing circle you can perform an impressive takedown manoeuvre, normally ending in a one hit kill. These takedowns involve environmental use, so if you’re standing next to a table when you press the button your opponents face will get slammed through it. It’s certainly impressive to watch. Get surrounded by enemies with all three sections filled then you can take them all out simply by pressing the buttons that flash up on screen. These QTE (Quick Time Events) play a big role in the majority of the game.

You can never really put the controller down and rest during the cut scenes because almost all of them have some form of QTE. They’re certainly a love/hate thing, but at least the indication of what button to press is a lot clearer here than it is in a game like Jericho. The big downside is that you only have a short period of time to press the corresponding button, with some later sections having a row of around five different button presses one after the other. If you screw up then it’s back to the beginning of the section, giving you no chance to learn the combination because the buttons change. During this it just feels like The Bourne Conspiracy is a lot more fun to watch than it is to actually play.

The shooting (which makes up the majority of the game) is certainly not the best. The guns don’t feel like they have any weight in them at all, the aiming reticule goes all over the place at the slightest touch and unless it’s a straight shot in the head you have to unload half a clip into each foe before they go down. Nothing though is worse than the car chase sequence. Like the movie you’re being chased by cops and are taken down a specific path with only a few shortcuts accessible. Cars are plentiful and will annoy you as, instead of acting like they normally would, when you hit them they just stop dead, having to reverse before moving away again. It’s quite strange that in the streets of Paris there are no pedestrians for you to mow down which would have made it a little more interesting and, of course, a QTE has been tacked on to the end with far more button presses than it needs.

With an in-built achievement system you’d have thought this would be prime material for second flythrough, but it’s not. After completing it the once we felt no need to go back again to complete it on a higher difficulty. Lasting around six hours it’s not exactly worth the £40 price tag either. The biggest disappointment in our eyes is you’re not controlling a virtual Matt Damon, instead they’ve gone with the most featureless character imaginable. Just think of all the character creation tools in games and the generic starting character you get, this is that character. They couldn’t have made him less interesting if he was made out of matchsticks. Disappointing considering the overall feel of the game is like the movie and not to mention using the same brilliant musical score.

Playing this we couldn’t help but feel that it should’ve been much, much more. Hand to hand combat is fine, but everything else that surrounds it is the definition of average. Lets hope the inevitable sequel gets more things right.

Rating: 5 / 10

Words by Adam Gulliver