Sunday, August 15, 2010

Review: Clash of the Titans: The Video Game



When I saw Clash of the Titans in the theater, I fell asleep, and after playing the video game, I had to take a nap. What does that tell you? Well, besides the fact that it says that the awful remake is even worse than the original -- which at least had Ray Harryhausen’s bitchin’ stop motion animation in it -- it also means that the game is a piece of garbage, which it is. It really is.

Now, the first impression I had on the game when watching the trailer and seeing stills of it was that it was going to be yet another God of War rip-off in a string of subpar GOW rip-offs (See Ghost Rider, Darksiders,Dante’s Inferno, etc). But no, surprisingly, it’s not a GOW rip-off at all. In fact, I wish it was a GOW rip-off, because then at least I could find it mildly enjoyable. If anything, with its crummy tap, tap, tap, hack and slash nonsense, it’s more like a Dynasty Warriors game but with about a million less enemies on screen. This is a good thing, because even fighting four enemies on screen at one time is a complete bore. Did I tell you that I had to take a nap after playing it?


Since I’ve already delved into the combat, let me continue on that path. It’s a joke, a complete and utter joke. The sole innovation in this game, if you can call it that, is that you can steal weapons from some of your enemies and then use them against other enemies…Riveting…The fact that you can acquire a wide assortment of weapons doesn’t help either as they’re all boring to use, and the enemies really don’t even take that much effort to kill (even the later ones once you’ve gotten the system down) anyway, so what’s the point? Instead of the button timed attacks in GOW, this game has something similar but much simpler in that you can wear an enemy down and then a bullseye appears on them where you can press any button to attack them, kind of like one of the meters on a free-throw line in a basketball video game. You have to hit the button at just the right moment or the enemy hits you back, which sounds like it could be pretty cool, but it’s not as it happens way too often. After awhile, you don’t even want to bother fighting anybody anymore because you’re so bored by the combat that you just want to move on to whatever’s next, which is probably more of the same as the missions have little to no variety whatsoever. Zzzzzz.

Oh, and speaking of Zzzzz, the storyline in this game, like the movie itself, is also pretty yawn-inducing. Man and the gods are fighting because man stopped praying to them and yada, yada, yada, there’s a Kraken, some skeletons along the way, some boss battles, the end. There’s also a two player mode but it also sucks. It comes a little later in the game and I really had to push myself to get to it, but once my brother picked up the controller to play, he put it back down after about five minutes because he didn’t think it was worth his time. I agree.


The graphics are also pretty pitiful, even for a movie tie-in game. Often times, I’d wander around and wonder how a game for the 360 could wind up looking so bland. And it’s not even like it looks last-gen or anything like that because the models are definitely clear enough to be considered current-gen, if not just a few years behind. But it just needs more salt or something. The dull graphics kind of mute out any sort of grand presentation that they were trying to pull off here, and it almost makes the game seem minimalistic in its scope, which is definitely something you don’t want with a title like Clash of the Titans. You want something epic. You want something like, I don’t know, God of War.

Clash of the Titans is one of those rare games that I can literally find not one redeeming quality for. If you liked the film (How?), then I don’t know what to tell you about the video game other than that it sucks. Okay, back to sleep now. I just took a peek at the back of the box and had a sudden urge to take another nap. Good night.

Players: 2 player Co-op (Sometimes)
Platform(s): Xbox 360 (Reviewed), PS3
Developer: Game Republic
Publisher: Namco Bandai
ESRB: Teen
Rating: Half a Star

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