Beowulf: The Game

As I will mention many times in this review, I haven't seen the Beowulf movie and I have no interest in seeing it.  I know a little bit about the Beowulf history but that's about it.  With that said, the storyline still made no sense to me at all.  The battle system was bland.  The platforming was awful.  The QTE's they make you do is just annoying.  I especially hated the pacing of the game, which always made you felt rushed for time and gave you little reason to search for secrets.  

overall, Beowulf was a bland beat'em up.  If you want a game in this similar fashion but better, please check out Viking.  

----------Battle System----------
Beowulf is mostly a typical God of War style beat'em up.  There are only a few times that are pretty interesting about the game.  The biggest thing I want to point out are your Thanes.  They are like your Minons in Overlord or possibly Pikmin.  They follow you around and fight beside you, but you can also issue orders to them so they can move blocks or rotate a dial to open a gate.  If you want to them work harder to accomplish those goals quicker, you can then go into a stupid Quick Time Event style minigame.  A dial appears, and the buttons X and Y slowly rotate around and you hit them at the right time.  If you screw up, then your men fall down and you have to start over.  

You also do stupid QTE's in battle too, much like God of War or Viking.  You can grab an enemy, and them quickly tap the B button like in a Wrestling game.  Once you have control of the enemy, you can then choose to throw them, steal their weapon or smash them into gorey bits.  

The weapon system reminded me of the old PC game Rune.  It was just a bunch of random weapons, none of them felt important.  If you attack to often, then they will eventually break.  You can steal them or find them in racks.  There wasn't a whole lot of choices with the weapons either.

There are two "modes" you can go into.  If you go into your Fury mode, you are basically invincible.  You can easily turn this on by holding down the R Trigger or each time you get attacked, a little meter fills up.  Once you are in Fury mode, you can squash any enemy in sight without much of a threat.  It only lasts for a short period though.  The biggest draw back against this is you can hurt your allies as well, so you have to be careful when to use it.

The other is "Herotic" mode, this will give all your allies higher defense and stronger AI so they can defend for themselves a little better.  One of my biggest problems with the game is how stupid the AI your characters are.  They always felt more like a burden than anything else because if they all die, then the game is over.  

The WORST part about the game is the terrible platforming.  Ok, it's not the worst platforming I've ever done, but there is one section in the game that requires you to make a "long jump" across two pillar type things.  You have to time the jump perfectly or else your character will fall down.  Which isn't terrible in theory because you don't die from bad jumps.  However, in this particular instance, the jumping sequence was in a timed based level, which means I had only 1 or 2 chances to make the jump or else it was "Game Over".  I swear, I ran through this section of the level atleast 40 times until I finally beat it.


----------Characters / Story----------
As I mentioned before, I haven't seen the movie, so I have no idea if it follows the storyline to a tee, or what.  Since I have no frame of reference, I have to judge the storyline as if it was a 100% original IP.  Even though I know the Beowulf myth quite well, I still had some trouble following the storyline in thsi game.  The dialog was bad, the characters were bland, and the pacing was godawful.  I just couldn't follow anything with it, and that's terrible.


----------Graphics----------
The graphics are really inconsistent.  The stages are kind of bland looking, everything is either grey for mountains or red for fire.  The regular enemies are boring looking, and your Thane followers all look exactly the same.  Sometimes your Thanes just blend in with the enemies, so you have no clue who is fighting who.  The cutscenes are rather stiff looking at times.

However, some of the boss fights are huge, not quite as cool or as exciting looking as a God of War boss fight, but overall pretty nice looking.  The "finishing" moves and gore is really nice too.

----------Sound----------
I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know how the voices and music matches up to it.  I do dig the music though, especially when you start to get in trouble, the drums start to pound real loud.  It's not original but it's a good effect, most games like this usually just have very light ambient sounds, I'm glad this one went into a more dynamic direction.  

The voice work wasn't all that impressive.  The music buried the voices most of the time, so I rarely had an idea what people were saying.  Your "Thanes" often scream the same catch phrases over and over, it becomes annoying.


----------World Map----------
Beowulf runs rather linearly for the most part, which is disappointing to an extent because there are things you can skip and never be able to reach again.  About half way into the game you get to a world map, but you really don't have much options with it.  Then at the very end of the game, you unlock the "full" world map, and it basically means you can retrace 2 previous areas.  You can only go through a very small section of those previous areas.  


----------Time to Complete Game----------
7:46:24

The ending (including the final boss) was a bit weird and sudden.  No specials for beating the game as far as I noticed.  I tried to "continue" my last save and all it did was take me back to the final cutscene.  Blah