Yooo Joe!
Playing through the twelve hour campaign of GI Joe RoC is a lot of fun. The story has the Joes on the trail of a mysterious and powerful new enemy, Cobra. Paying homage to the 80s cartoon, the MASS Device takes center stage in the storyline, and one mission has the Joes destroying the Weather Dominator, too. The story is pretty average and largely predictable, but it works well enough as a backdrop to all the action.
I would describe the action intensive gameplay as a mix of the old run-and-gun Konami arcade with heavy influence from Gears of War and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Just like in Gears, taking cover in GI Joe is vitally important. No matter which of the twelve Joes (and later, four Cobra) characters you play as, they all are subject to the same fragile health system. You’ll know how bad off you are by looking at the triangular health icon floating above the character’s heads. All other objects and enemies in the game will have a horizontal bar for a health meter. The only way to regain health is with time. Anyway, the amount of time it takes to regenerate health is drastically reduced if you take cover behind an object by pressing A when near it. Players can also pop in and out of cover to attack turrets, BATs, vehicles, Vipers, the rest of Cobra’s forces. Additionally, some cover types can be destroyed, while others are permanent and cannot be destroyed. The difficulty settings, which are Casual, Advanced, and Hardcore, relate directly to the health/death system. In Casual, which is the default setting, when a player dies, they respawn immediately. In Advanced, you have to wait until the next mission checkpoint. Finally, on Hardcore, each character gets one life, per mission, that’s it.
While each playable character is subject to the same health system, and controls the same way in terms of movement and aiming, they differ from each other in several ways. Besides the obivous difference in name, appearance, and voice, the Joes have different specialties. There are three classes of characters: Commando, Combat Solider, and Heavy. The Commandos include Agent Helix, Scarlett, Storm Shadow, Kamakura, and of course, Snake Eyes. These badasses are all adept at melee combat and can do a great deal of damage with their close range techniques including kicks and swords. Combat Soldiers are okay at melee, but are more suited for straight-forward ranged combat with machine guns and the like. Combat Soldiers include the likes of Duke, Ripcord, Beachhead, Firefly, and Shipwreck. Heavy characters are all about destruction. While slow with melee combat and not having the range of a combat soldier, Heavies can unleash a lot of punishment with their weaponry. In this class, players will discover Heavy Duty, Destro, Gung Ho, and Backblast.
Each character has a distinctive weapon and secondary weapon, too. Beachhead has an auto shotgun, while Snake Eyes carries a laser pistol. Duke has a standard machine gun while Gung Ho carries a grenade launcher. Secondary abilities include things like deployable turrets for Ripcord, close range incendiary grenades for Firefly, and a sword fury attack with Snake Eyes. Secondary abilities can only be used when you’ve either picked up a corresponding powerup or earned them. Each character can “carry” up to three Secondary attacks, and you use them by pressing B. Used properly, these secondary abilities are lifesavers, especially Ripcord’s deployable turrets. In fact, my most effective pair was using Ripcord and Gung Ho. With Ripcord’s deployable turrets and Gung Ho’s grenade launcher, the Cobras had a hell of a time stopping me.
Getting to know character abilities is easy, and it’s worth taking the time to experiment. Before starting any mission, you can read through a character profile to see what their class and abilities are. Plus, you always select two characters to take into battle, and you can switch between the two instantly with the Right Bumper. Furthermore, in true arcade fashion, a friend can pick up another controller and hop right into the action, taking over control of the CPU’s character. It’s just as easy to drop back out. The two characters that start the mission don’t have to be the same ones that finish it. Normally, there will be a teleport chamber from which you can swap characters. These chambers are always near optional doors that you can only unlock with a certain character class. So, if you are currently running about with a Combat Soldier and a Heavy, but need a Commando for a particular locked door, you can use one of the teleport chambers to trade for one (and you can also trade back after the door is open). These optional doors are always worth unlocking, by the way; they contain various pickups that range from points to Contact data that leads to the ability to purchase other characters.
On that note, at the start of the campaign, players can only choose between Duke and Scarlett. As you locate Contact pickups and complete an optional mission in each chapter, you get the ability to unlock other characters by using your Battle Points. Battle Points are earned by completing checkpoints within missions, and missions themselves. Defeating bosses (there are five all told), earns you an extra Points. How many Battle Points you earn depends on how well you perform within a mission and on what difficulty mode you’re playing on. Finding all of the collectibles, harvesting all of the pickups, and generally just kicking butt earns you one of several ranks ranging from Sloppy Joe to GI Joe. Of the four possible ranks (or ratings) for a mission, I most often got the second best, Super Joe, and with that I garnered myself three Battle Points (instead of one or five). These Battle Points are used only to unlock other playable characters; there is no upgrade system or anything like that. By the time I finished the campaign, I had enough points to unlock all but three of the available sixteen characters. Given how GI Joe was designed, it’s up to me as to whether or not I want to replay any mission to try to earn a better score. Plus, now having beaten the game, I can play as Destro, Baroness, or Firefly, which is pretty darn cool (Storm Shadow is playable before game’s end).
Getting to the end of the game takes a good while, it took me about twelve hours on Advanced difficulty. There are twenty missions in all, with about four of those being optional, but still highly recommended as they add to the story and allow you to unlock other playable characters. Missions take place across the globe and in different climates — these include the Artic, Desert, Jungle, and Tundra. There are no climate specific changes to how the game is played, as frankly from the minute you set foot in the Artic the gameplay is really the same throughout. Ammo is infinite, there is no overheat or cooldown mechanic, no friendly fire to worry about — just you, your fellow Joe, and tons of Cobras. Mission objectives are all basic, as is what you have to do to achieve them. Mission types include rescuing captured Joes, destroying Cobra facilities, and keeping Cobra from destroying Joe hardware. Force fields and shields require you to locate and destroy nearby generators, while other basic objectives have you going up to a computer panel and holding down Y for a few seconds. The gameplay is indeed straight-forward, kid safe, and it doesn’t really change from the first minute to the last at its core, but it’s still a lot of fun.
Story advancements and other situational updates come to you through your earpiece. Much like Gears of War, whenever a player is getting an in-game update, the characters hold their hand to their earpiece and movement is slowed down. You’ll get directions from Stalker, who is assisted by Breaker, Dial Tone, and Data Frame, with an overall directive coming down from General Hawk. Each chapter has an operative in the field as well that chimes in with updates; these include Snowjob, Dusty, and Recondo for the Artic, Desert, and Jungle chapters respectively. Lift Ticket and Wild Bill will provide air support at some scripted sequences, too. While you never interact with these beyond radio chatter, their input pads the story.
Cooobrraaa (la la la la.. come on, who can resist?)
So what else does GI Joe offer? Well, there are still several gameplay facets I have yet to discuss. One of my favorites was the Accelerator suit ability. As you and your teammate, be they human or CPU controlled, blast through a mission, a circular meter in the center of the HUD fills up. This meter fills up most quickly when you and your teammate are firing at the same foe. When it’s full, simply press Y and your Joes will drop on their Accelerator suits, filling up your health and making you invulnerable for about twenty seconds. During this time, the Joes look different, fire some kind of special weapon, and can shoot small rockets as their secondary fire, too. Also during this time, a remixed version of the old GI Joe cartoon theme song plays. It’s a pretty thrilling little power up ability I have to say. Double Helix did a nice job of making this fairly hard to come by ability a real treat whenever you unleash it. It’s fun to see, sounds great, and is very effective.
To this point I’ve been fairly neutral and mostly positive about my experience with GI Joe, and that’s not by coincidence as that’s really the gist of my feelings for the game. That said, there are some issues with it, of course, some more severe than others, but nothing that should keep you from at least renting it. To start with, the camera and aiming can be a real pain, but it’s more of a nuisance than a game-breaker. Players don’t have control over how the camera behaves, and a dozen or more occassions, there were moments where the camera was pointing about 180 degrees in the opposite direction of where my characters were looking (i.e., where the action was). It can be a little jarring, because you can’t really see what lies ahead of you or what your Joes might be running into (there are no environmental dangers though, but there are lots of Cobra and turrets). These instances are fairly brief, and given the length of the game, don’t come up much, but they’re definitely noticeable.
Related to that is how the aiming behaves. You might not have any control over what the camera is doing, but you can control what your character is shooting at. Players can adjust what their character is firing at simply by pressing the right stick, generally left or right, to cycle between target-able objects (be they enemies, structures, etc). One nuisance in this is that the characters seem to prefer to target the shootable points pickup, rather than Cobra foes. Furthermore, and this may be a good thing depending on how you play, the characters don’t automatically switch to shooting at the most dangerous, or even the closest foe. So, in that sense, the targeting requires a bit more manual intervention and management than may be expected, but it works well enough.
The cover system in GI Joe is both good and bad. The good of course is that it adds another aspect to the gameplay and it keeps the game from being an all out arcade affair. Of course, if you play on the default difficulty, Casual, it’s basically an arcade game because you instantly respawn when dead. Anyway, that the cover system heals you quicker is fine, but where the cover system falters in that same regard. Only certain objects act as cover, and you’ll know which because an icon or prompt pops up as you walk near a valid cover object. These aren’t hard to spot due to their placement in the game world, and there are only about ten or so types of cover objects too, so it isn’t long at all before you know what works and what doesn’t. That said, I thought it was kind of silly that players have to cover behind certain objects to regain health quicker than just being out of site of the enemy. So, even when no enemies are around, if you want to regain health quickly, you have to bump up to a cover object. The point being that this mechanic seems a little contrived.
The AI is another point of concern to bear in mind. All told, there are about a dozen different enemies including a few different types of Vipers, BATs, drones, turrets, and even a few vehicles. Similiar to your CPU controlled partner, the AI tends to play it safe and does pretty well for itself. Other times, the AI goofs up and you will see Cobra foes that are stuck behind a wall, requiring you to come up to them parallel-style to finish them off. Enemy AI is also heavily (but not solely) focused on you, leaving your CPU partner to tarnish the cover mechanic because they rarely will take cover. That, combined with the fact that CPU players can’t die, opens up a sneaky game “exploit” that makes playing through Advanced and Hardcore a lot easier. I don’t know if this was done by design or not, but if your character is near death and you can’t get to cover, simply tap the Right Bumper to instantly switch to the character the CPU was controlling. Almost always, this character will have full health because the enemy AI was focusing on your character. Plus, since the CPU controlled character can’t die, it doesn’t matter if you switched out of the other character right before death — the CPU will keep him alive. Depending on how you look at it, that’s either a major design flaw or just something that makes playing through single player more enjoyable and easier. I took it to be more so the latter, simply because I don’t take this as a really “serious” game. I saw it as more of a loose, blast-through-it kind of affair, and if I exploit that switching feature to keep me playing instead of restarting a mission, that sounds good to me.
Players will have to restart missions anytime both characters die within the same mission checkpoint (on Advanced or Hardcore modes). This can be a bummer if you die during a boss fight, but generally it’s the part right before a boss fight I found to be the hardest, but these were still very manageable. I do appreciate that Double Helix allowed players to skip through the dialogue at the start of each mission checkpoint by pressing Start several times. As I’m sure many of you agree, there’s nothing more grating than not being able to skip a cutscene or in-game sequence when you are having to replay something over again.
Something else I noticed during play that I think other gamers will pick up on too is that the level design is quite simliar from one mission to the next, even when the environments change. This isn’t to say that the levels are exactly the same, but they often do feel very simliar. Most of the action takes place outside, with rock walls and cliffs acting as the borders of the playing field. Across all four environments, it’s not hard to notice the similarities between the levels, although how much that really bothers you is up to the individual. For me, it was just something I noticed, but it didn’t really bother me much.
Vehicles are another part of the experience that adds some extra high octane action to an already frenzied experience. Players will have the chance to control the Snowcat, Desert Panther, a Humvee, and the all powerful MOBAT. Controlling these vehicles takes just a little getting used to, and they aren’t as modular as vehicles in other third person games, but they’re fun. When I say they aren’t as modular, I simply mean that you can’t have just one of the two characters in the vehicle, and you can’t decide if you just want to control the weapons or drive. As the player, you always have to drive, and your CPU AI will fire, but, you can also take the firing controls as well and just do both tasks. Ultimately, whether you’re controlling or battling against vehicles, it’s a positive addition to the experience.
GI Joe: RoC also features a lot of unlockable bonus content, primarily of the concept art variety. There are a few dozen different pieces of concept art to unlock, which is done by playing through the campaign. Players also find bits of information and filecards pertaining to characters, objects, and events in the game, all of which are viewable from the main menu. There are also eight or ten movies to unlock that include a couple of old school GI Joe PSAs, trailers, as well the handful of cutscenes from the campaign.
Of course, there are Achievements too, forty-three of them in fact. The Achievements are nicely scored and come at regular intervals, like when you defeat a boss or a chapter (usually both happen at once). There are some other interesting Achievements like defeating a mission with only melee attacks, etc., that some completionists may go after.
How about them graphics, you say? GI Joe won’t blow you away with its audio or video presentation, but they suffice. Graphically, it packs some pretty cool explosion effects, but for me the best part about the graphics were the character animations. I liked that some extra effort went into making the characters move and behave in a certain way you might expect them to. The best example is Snake Eyes; when taking cover, he just looks badass. And, whenever you want to hop over the cover object, Snake Eyes does this really cool flip over it. These extra touches add up, and I was happy to see them.
As for the audio, I was most impressed with the soundtrack. I just thought the soundtrack did a fine job of keeping up with the action on screen; it seemed to give the game a slightly more serious edge than what it actually had, too. The effects were only so-so; sometimes, the sound of my gunfire would actually fade out, almost to silent, for just a brief amount of time, and then fade back in. This wasn’t a common occurrence, but it was noticeable. Explosions sounded good, and other aural cues like the sound of BATs landing were cool, too. Less appealing were the voiceovers. While a voice crew of about fifteen people were brought in, I wasn’t impressed with most of the dialogue or how it sounded. Stalker and Hawk sounded too generic, while Firefly and Destro sounded way out of character — although in reality the upcoming film and their portrayal of these characters is likely to blame. Oh, and Cobra Commander’s “Cooobraa!” shrieks at the end of the game were horrible. Still, while the voiceovers weren’t really great, I was glad to have them instead of text, which would have slowed the pacing down a little too much.
With that, let’s get to the summary.