The Bourne Conspiracy is the video-game equivalent of blueballs.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: The Bourne Conspiracy is one hell of an action game. Unfortunately, the length of the game is very disappointing, and as such, The Bourne Conspiracy could have been much more than it is. As it stands, The Bourne Conspiracy is easily the best movie-to-game title of the year. But that isn’t exactly saying much.
The Bourne Conspiracy contains most of the plot points from the three movies, but it also delves back in to Bourne’s past as a deadly Treadstone assassin. The game jumps from one plot point to the next without any coherence, but, really, the story isn’t what you want from a game like The Bourne Conspiracy – and it’s not like the Bourne movies had an Oscar-worthy plot themselves – but it gets kind of hard to keep track of the story when it jumps from setting to setting without even giving the player a reasons as to why Bourne is actually doing it. I guess the developers expected that everyone who bought the game had watched the movies.
Lame story aside, The Bourne Conspiracy excels where games should excel: the gameplay. The main star of the show in The Bourne Conspiracy is the hand-to-hand combat, which is mind-numbingly simple: Triangle is a slow punch that inflicts a lot of damage on your opponent, and Square is a faster punch that doesn’t inflict as much damage as the other punch. You can, of course, string these moves in to different combos to inflict more damage on your opponent, and you can hold either button down to kick him instead, but if you want to take out your opponent quickly, you can perform a takedown. To perform a takedown you have to fill up your adrenaline bar by killing your enemies. Once you have filled up a section of your adrenaline bar (there are three sections you can fill up), you simply press Circle, and Bourne will execute his opponents in different ways, depending on the environment that he is in. For example, if you press Circle when Bourne is next to a railing, he will punch his opponent in the face and smack it in to the railing. But if he’s standing next to a pillar, he might just kick him in to it.
If you have all three sections of your adrenaline bar filled up, and three enemies standing around you, you can press Circle and engage in a flashy button-mashing sequence where Bourne will take out all three enemies standing around you – if you press the proper buttons, of course. This provides some sort of thought in to the gameplay, because you have to decide whether you want to use your adrenaline right away or if you want to save it for later use. You rarely have to think that hard about it, though, as the enemies aren’t exactly Einsteins when it comes to combat.
There’s only one thing wrong with the combat in The Bourne Conspiracy, and that is the gunplay. It’s not downright terrible, but it definitely feels lacking in comparison to the hand-to-hand combat – almost like an afterthought. It features your basic cover system and an over-the-shoulder view, and it works well enough. The takedowns also factor in to the gunplay, and the only difference is that you have to perform a quick-time event in order to perform them, but they don’t really feel as satisfying as the takedowns in the hand-to-hand combat.
The Bourne Conspiracy does a great job with realizing the “feel” of the Bourne movies; it features the “shaky cam” style of the movies, and you get to wreak havoc in a Mini Cooper in Paris – awesome. The only thing that takes you out of the whole “this is a Bourne movie as a game” is the fact that the Jason Bourne in the game doesn’t look like Matt Damon; High Moon Studios couldn’t get the rights to use Matt Damon’s face in the game, so they had to make a similar-looking character to use as Jason Bourne. It is a slight disappointment, but it isn’t enough to take away the enjoyment of the game.
On the visual side of things, The Bourne Conspiracy is decent. Environments and character models are okay at best, and the lip-syncing is downright awful. Compared to any other movie-licensed game out right now, Bourne definitely excels, but the graphics could definitely use some fine-tuning.
Audibly, The Bourne Conspiracy is much, much better. The weapon sounds and explosions are okay, but the point where the audio excels is definitely in the hand-to-hand scenarios. Punching an enemy in the face is accompanied by a stomach-churning crunch, and you can almost feel the pain your enemies are going through.
In the end, The Bourne Conspiracy had the potential to be much, much better than it is right now. Some fine tuning of the graphics and a longer playtime, and The Bourne Conspiracy had the potential to enter The Hall of Fame of movie-licensed games. As it stands, The Bourne Conspiracy is the equivalent of video-game blueballs.