Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Conspiracy is at once a hardboiled action game with awesome gunplay and knuckle-bruising combat and a narrow and repetitive experience that is tainted by poor design decisions. As Bourne you will relive past missions as you work your way up to and through present day to track down those involved in Operation Treadstone, and your identity. Along the way you will pock library walls with machinegun rounds, introduce a few faces to concrete, and floor it in a highly anticlimactic car chase. Let’s do this! Literary-style! Oh, yeah, this is based on the printed works and not the movies, so the characters won’t look or sound the same as their film counterparts. Now let’s do this!
The good news is that the lack of actor likenesses isn’t a bad thing, nor is this comparable to the decidedly poorer literary-licensed Lord of the Rings games as it actually has some redeemable qualities outside of its namesake. The bad news is that a lot of the redeemable qualities have been mixed with a design that doesn’t know just how involved it wants you to be.
The story is what you would expect. For those who haven’t seen the movies or read the books, then a quick summary is that you play an amnesia-stricken super karate agent that is trying to track down his former handlers and regain his identity. The problem is that the agency that trained him to be the perfect killer is also after him. Bourne’s quest for identity will take you across Europe as you assassinate past targets and bust present heads.
Being Bourne means that you play as a man that is well versed in hand-to-hand combat and firearms. Those skills will come in handy as you will obliterate libraries, museums, and faces. The beginning of the game focuses on fisticuffs while the latter focuses more on firearms, but there is a bit of each sprinkled throughout. As you come into contact with an opponent, the game will, if a weapon is drawn, remove the weapon from your hands and show a quick cutscene of you pummeling the assailant before the camera shifts to a 2D fighter-style orientation. Bourne has a weak and strong punch and kick, as well as a block. The combos are of a typical three-hit sort, a mixture of weak and strong, that are punch-oriented with the random kick sprinkled in. Like most of the over-the-top brawlers – think Dynasty Warriors – there will be two combos that dominate, with the rest of the limited set being used whenever you’re feeling frisky. A tip during loading makes note that enemies will end up in a different position depending on what combo is used, but I never had to get so involved that that kind of focus became an issue.
The gunplay is similar to Gears of War and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune – or kill.switch for you sticklers. The presentation follows the same tight and slightly titled third-person view and the mechanics are the same as well, with objects scattered throughout each level that can be used as cover. Bourne is, however, limited to what he can carry; he is restricted to a one- and a two-handed firearm – no explosives, knives, or anything of the sort. The highlight of the shootouts isn’t the covering system but the destructibility of the environment: few objects are truly safe to hide behind. That container you just had your back on is nothing more than a few splinters and loose boards once a couple of rounds find their way to it. Think True Crime: Streets of LA but done right and cranked up a few dozen notches. After a firefight areas will be littered with debris: concrete chunks and wood fragments on the floor; columns stripped to their steel bars; and cars with shattered windows and charred hulls clogging the streets. All actions games should have had and continue to have this level of destruction. It’s awesome.
There is a lack of consistency and technical problems, however, which keeps the combat from being too awesome. The hand-to-hand fights never evolve past a quick one-two of block, combo because there is no penalty to block; that is, you can block any and all moves thrown at you, from a boss or otherwise. Fighting builds up adrenaline that can be unleashed on an opponent in the form of a takedown move: if you have the maximum three bars of the meter filled, engaging it means that you will take down up to three opponents, quick time event-style, if enough are nearby. Low-level enemies go down after one takedown move, so if the third or fourth combo doesn’t knock them out, unleashing the stored adrenaline will. There are mid tier enemies that will take a few takedowns to defeat and bosses will take even more, along with a constant string of combos. The takedowns differ between melee and gun combat, with the melee being much more diverse as objects, such as chairs and fences are brought into play. The takedowns are nice, and every now and then they will make you feel as badass as Bourne is supposed to be, but the entire system is simply a revolving door: block until ready, hit with a combo, block, combo, then either combo or takedown. Repeat. A block breaker or limit would at least make things a little bit tense.
Boss battles are only slightly more engaging than regular foes. The bosses can also perform takedown maneuvers which can be parried by completing a quick time event. Be prepared to go through a lot of events, because the bosses tend to either come with a serious reservoir of adrenaline or build it up much faster during the fight. Inexplicably, you cannot parry any other moves, including the simple combos of the lower baddies; nor can you keep the batons and knives that you take from them during combat. And another oddity is that your weapons suddenly disappear when a have a close encounter with an enemy. The sudden disappearance of both weapons is only rarely explained, and when they are the reason is never very good: Bourne will be kicked, drop his shotgun, and then promptly forgets about his pistol. I know High Moon wants to show off the melee system, but it doesn’t make much sense for an agent on the run to spend twenty minutes duking it out with someone rather than just shooting them in the head and running off.
The main problem with the combat is that it is largely inconsequential. I didn’t even lose a hand-to-hand fight until the last hour before I beat the game, and that was mainly because the game threw in one of its many arbitrary counters to inflate the difficulty. If I can block everything, regardless of the strength or number of the blow, what’s the point of fighting? I’m never going to be in any real danger from a standard fight. There will be times when other people will shoot at you while you fight, which is extremely annoying because you have to try to angle the opponent between yourself and the shooter and hope the computer doesn’t have a clip of magic rounds – the rounds they often have during those moments, the kind that go through your opponent and into you. The auto rebuff and taking of the boxer pose during close contact is an effort to be seamless and guide the player into hand-to-hand without being too jarring, which would be nice if there wasn’t a guy with a gun two feet to the left that hasn’t stopped shooting since he saw you. Due to the fact that the camera is often poor during these moments, in particular when anywhere indoors, it will often occur that you cannot see yourself, your opponent, or anyone during some critical moments.
I enjoyed the firefights much more than the melee combat. The destructible environments go a long way in making you feel that you are a force to be reckoned with. There are also strategically placed objects, cars in particular, laid about just so for maximum effect. It’s all painfully convenient, but they add to the flow of the combat enough to where they are a-okay by me. The only downsides to gunfights are that the enemy can often take an insane amount of bullets – ten-plus rounds – and the camera makes control difficult. Unlike Resident Evil 4 or Gears of War, Bourne is always in the locked-and-loaded position when his weapon is out, gun at the ready; unlike the others where pressing a shoulder button causes the view to tighten in as the gun is brought up, the camera Bourne Conspiracy stays tight around him. The problem with that is how it severely limits your viewpoint and keeps the controls really stiff, making navigation while a weapon is out, which is pretty much all the time, a bit cumbersome. Regardless, I still had a great time shooting it out in alleyways and courtyards. The sound is absolutely fantastic throughout, punching a gut or shooting a shotgun really comes across as such, and the model reactions to each were dead-on and really brought the action to the level where it needed to be.
For all of the great touches, like bodies being bruised during fights and the movies’ patent shaky camera being present, there are numerous bits that nag and gnaw at the experience. The one that I found most frustrating were the numerous timers that were tossed about in an effort to give an enhanced sense of tension. The problem with them was that they were often included in bits that did not need them, because of obvious external threats, such as Marines chasing you with assault rifles or police in hot pursuit, that were not actually correlated with the timer: if the timer is there to indicate when the police will surround you, then why is there a meter that indicates how close they are to actually catching you? Instead of outrunning one, you have to outrun both, but the real threat is obvious and the inclusion of a timer did nothing more than break the sense of immersion and made the experience aggravating rather than exhilarating. Another good example are the cheats that are unlocked after completing the game: instead of having the options appear with on and off choices in the cheat menu, you have to jot down strings of words that you haven’t had to do since you popped in Metroid on your NES – noIdon’trememberthecodetogetunlimitedammo. The in-level graphics were also solid, especially when shit hit the fan, but the cutscenes were horrible with poor contrast and tons of artifacts. There is a whole lot of give and take throughout.
Overall: 6.5/10
Had Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Conspiracy been nothing more than melee combat or gunfights, then it would have been a much more humdrum affair. Fortunately, the game has enough variety to keep things moving enough so that its flaws never manage to overbear. As it is, The Bourne Conspiracy offers up a decent experience for a weekend rental.
