Random Review : G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra

Just finished the game G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra on Xbox 360.  The idea of the game was good.  The execution was rather….meh.

The game is kindof a 3rd person top down/isometric shooter.  but you have absolutely no control over the camera!  In most of the games like this you have at least some control over the camera.  you might not be able to rotate the full 360 degrees, but at least you can move it so you can see your characters on the frigging screen!  there were several places in the game where you had to make a left or right turn to go around the corner.  and for several seconds, you couldn’t even see your characters until the camera caught up with you!  That’s just insane.  Instead of having the right thumbstick control the camera, it controlled what you were targeting.  I would have much rather had camera control and then use the left/right bumpers for target control.

It had lots of Joe characters, so that was cool, but there wasn’t a lot of differentiation between them.  There were 3 classes: soldier (standard run and gun), commando (fast+weak/melee), and heavy (slower but more powerful weapon).  all of the characters had some kind of special attack, like grenades or stun or something, but some of the special attacks were not very useful.  Snake-eyes is pretty much everyone’s favorite character, and you unlock him rather early, but he wasn’t super effective. 😉

There were also special doors throughout the game that only one of those classes could unlock, so it was generally good to have 2 different classes for the two different players you could control in any mission.  I generally used a heavy and a soldier, as the commandos’ weapons were pretty useless.  If you ran into a door that needed a commando, usually there was a device nearby that would let you swap out a character, so that wasn’t generally a big deal.

The voice acting was pretty meh, the cutscenes were ok, the story was ok, the achievements were reasonable.  The game was pretty linear, with some (but not much) choice of which missions to do in what order.  But what missions in what order didn’t really have any impact on the story or the game or anything.

I know it is a remake that goes along with the new movies, but i would have much rather had a little more cartoony game like the original cartoons were.