Best Movie Game in a While
This is the best movie tie-in game in a few years.
This is also damning with faint praise. When your competition consists of a terrible Harry Potter shooter by EA, Sega's assorted crimes against Marvel movies, Battle: Los Angeles, etc, being the best is not exactly an accomplishment of the highest order. And that it is a DC game always leaves me concerned (thinking of all Superman games, Batman games outside of Arkham Asylum, Aquaman, etc). DC properties are notoriously bad at being turned into entertaining games.
But GL turned out to be a rather solid, but unimpressive, title.
You are Hal Jordan, the human Green Lantern, trying to help fight off an invasion of Oa to protect the great battery from an attack. So, you're stuck fighting off with tons of enemies, mechs, and assorted other species in a collection of battles. You are in a near-constant state of battle and, fortunately, the controls for the title are more than enough to keep the conflict enjoyable. It is quite spammable in spots, even on the highest difficulty level, but you do need to occasionally switch up things. You are given a dozen different ring constructs that also provide you with a nice addition to your repertoire of attacks. You can produce gatling guns and rocket launchers (which are unbelievably beneficial in the tougher battles). You can create bats, hammers, and even a jet. And while most of these constructs do have a bit of a warm-up period before their use, you will quickly figure it out how quickly and it will become an almost seamless experience in using the powers.
The game, admittedly, is decent. But it is, by no means, outstanding. First off, it is fairly quick. Even on hard, it will take almost 6 hours. The puzzles are, on average, poor. There are one or two decent ones, but there are enough to make the game a grind at points. You have to insert batteries that you have to fling at the outlets from a long enough distance to not have them blow up due to you being too close nor not too far away that they will not make it to the outlet. You use bombs to open up some ports, but the aim is a bit sketchy. You can't toss them at the ports, but you don't have to be all that accurate in terms of inserting them at close proximity. The levels are linear as the day is long and your lack of control over the camera makes it occasionally irritating. Also, some of the enemy attacks are way more irritating than they are damaging. Even on hard, outside of the boss battles, there are few major stumbling blocks in the levels. Enemies are cannon fodder and abnormally dull in design and AI patterns.
Cutscenes are a bit too frequent for my tastes and take way too long to allow you to skip them. The cutscenes aren't terribly good and don't look all that great. You also get the transparently "We'll have you walk slowly talking to your ring so we can load up the level in the background nonsense" that is also more than a bit irritating. Also, unless I'm nuts, wasn't Sinestro a bad guy? I haven't watched the movie yet, but I am quite sure that Sinestro was an adversary of Hal Jordan, not his "good buddy". I am not a huge fan of the lore of Green Lantern, so none of the other characters had any actual meaning to me, either positively or negatively. And while achievements/trophies aren't the end-all/be-all, that some of the achievements will openly require grinding to get doesn't really help things. A game where you cannot actually get the achievements/trophies without the necessity of grinding is not a terrific game, IMO.
The occasional flying sequence is a nice change of pace and fairly short. Your lock on missiles are lovely to have and that you have to move around to avoid attacks is nice, but the whole thing just seems like it is tossed in and completely superfluous to the overall game. One almost sees the developers realizing that they need something to change the pace and just stuck in some of those levels for no reason.
But this shouldn't be viewed as a dig. The game isn't bad. It is something I could recommend you rent with no hesitations, but I do not think that the game, at full price, is close to being worth the money.
