Matt Damon really doesn’t understand
why people went to see him in an action
role. “I lobbied hard to not make a first-person
shooter game but to make it more like Myst,
which was a great interesting puzzle you tried
to solve – you know, to play with his amnesia
or his memory…they weren’t interested. They
made the video(game) anyway, without my
likeness.” Word-up, Matt – nobody went to see
the Bourne movies to see you furrow your brow
at a crossword. They put their hands to their
wallets because you kicked a series of asses in
a variety of imaginative and brutally punishing
ways. You don’t have a face that looks like it
should kick one, let alone a series of asses, yet
asses you did kick and it was awesome. When
someone makes a game based on your asskickery
then it should come as no shock that the
game is ultimately about ass kicking.
Matt’s reluctance to get involved hasn’t had
any affect on the net result of this movie/book
tie-in experience. It’s a compression of all the
action from the programmed-assassin-going-
wrong movie, expanded with more action from
bits in the books, handled with efficiency that
you just don’t usually get from games based
on action films or books. Slightly creaky
in places, but with no serious issues that
stop it from keeping your adrenal
gland pumping nervous happy
sauce around your body, it knows
what its job is, and does it.
Here’s how.
Jason Bourne’s mind is
always bubbling away,
subconsciously working
out ways to bring a lot
of hurt to multiple
people in as fast and
nifty a manner as
possible, and this
is conveyed in
the game by his
Bourne Sense.
At its most
basic, this
just means that you can press ‘Y’ and
you’ll know where the exit, button,
weapon or enemy is, and Bourne will
automatically fire at a nearby target
in a seamlessly integrated cut-scene.
With three bits of BS in store, you
can empty a three-man room using
QTEs. Bam! Bam! Bam! The trick is
to decide when being such a show
off is really necessary, because
without any BS left you won’t
know if there are goons
around a corner who will
knock your gun out of
your hand and engage
you close-up, using a
martial arts style that
you could imagine the
Israeli army finding a
little bit harsh.
Bourne can also trigger BS in hand-to-hand
mode to perform a Takedown move that can
nullify most enemies (with one smack of their
head against a photocopier, or whatever
else is close by). Certain boss or mid-boss
dudes will require more hits and a lot more
defending to build up the BS. And while these
encounters work in the context of the filmbook
adaptation, they aren’t strong enough to
make you want to experience them twice, while
some of the boss encounters are ridiculously
cheap (often infuriatingly so). Fights with time
limits deny you time to block, while the buttonbashery
of the engagements – and the ‘oh look,
the enemy has pulled a knife from their back
pocket’ moments – can make for tiring work.
Gunplay takes time to adjust to, especially for
Rainbow Six veterans, and you have to work
to forgive loose aiming controls before your
own instinct compensates for what could have
just been a better system in the first place.
Consider it a fifty pound movie ticket and you’ll
get a weekend of Bourne that demonstrates
that games can pillage movies without being
soulless cash-ins. Expect more depth and
longevity and you are being Matt Damon.
