Hasbro’s G.I. Joe franchise returns to consoles for the first time in eleven years with GameMill’s G.I. Joe: Operation Blackout. The Gears-like third person co-op cover shooter puts players in the boots of twelve different characters from the Joe and Cobra sides throughout several missions that unfold the story of Cobra’s latest diabolical plot.
Growing up playing with the toys and watching the cartoon, GI Joe still holds a special place in my heart as a childhood nostalgic treat, so I had to try this game out even though I was confident it was never meant to be a AAA quality production. Nevertheless, nostalgia and couch co-op play can cover a multitude of issues for a game, and that’s largely the case here, too. To that end, I would highly advise not to plan on playing this game single player. The fun factor tanks hard when you immediately realize how the core gameplay boils down to going from A to B, flipping a switch, dealing with waves of bad guys, and repeating until a not-so-climactic boss fight. The CPU controlled character that you run around with is almost entirely useless, rarely being targeted by the enemy, evidently never using their special move (called Ultimate’s), and having braindead skills. As an example of the frustrating lack of help and skill that your AI partner exhibits, a common tactic in this game and genre for that matter is backpedaling while aiming and shooting foes. The AI can’t do that. Instead, because it’s programmed to follow you, it will run, back towards the enemy, right close to you, but never have the sense to turn around and shoot/help you repel the bad guys.
When playing single player, the experience is mostly a slog through wave after wave of enemies who can sustain a lot of damage. Fortunately, your player can sustain a lot of damage as well, and fully heal within seconds of staying out of combat (such as hiding behind cover). Your armor gets replenished with in-game pickups, but your health regenerates on its own. This makes the game feel like a battle of a largely-immortal-you versus dozens upon dozens of enemies, BATS for the most part when fighting Cobra. This is pretty fun, but with the crap friendly AI and the repetitive nature of the mission layouts and design, it gets pretty stale, pretty quick.
So do yourself a favor and play this game with a couch co-op buddy and it’s a lot more of an enjoyable experience. Most missions offer a pretty compelling pairing of characters that you get to choose from, such as Sci-Fi and Scarlett in one of the early snow missions. Each of the twelve characters has their own unique Ultimate ability, such as Sci-Fi launching a drone, or Lady Jay using one of her special spears to create a protective shield dome around her that lasts for several seconds. The Ultimate’s build up over time, and rather quickly really, during a mission as you defeat the enemy. Players also carry two weapons, one that is unique to them, and then a second weapon that can be changed out as you go. The unique weapon typically has much less ammo, but is more powerful, and usually also requires mores skill and luck to hit. Sci-Fi, who turned out to be one of my favorite characters in the game to my surprise, has a cool railgun type weapon, but it holds little ammo and is hard to get a bead on most enemies since they move around so much.
Secondary weapons include Uzis with 600 rounds of ammo, sniper rifles (though with a very modest zoom), and all purpose assault rifles. These are all handy to use, and fortunately ammo is rarely a problem as ammo crates and enemy drops keep you replenished. Grenades are in lesser supply, obviously, but still quite handy. At times, automated turrets and even being able to drive vehicles is built-in for a change of pace, though the vehicle driving is largely on rails. The shooting mechanics are just ok, though. Earlier I mentioned the bullet-sponge nature of most of the enemies and your characters, but aiming tends to be nuisance as well, especially with weapons that require precise timing and placement. The enemies tend to strafe a lot, which makes getting those satisfying shots tougher and I found myself just resorting to the weapons that gave me the most ammo to compensate with.
Similar to Gears of War, I liked the ‘mini-game’ that pops up on your reticule when you reload (the game does not auto-reload for you by the way). When you press reload, a small marker sweeps through the reticule, and if you time it just right you will instantly reload your weapon. Otherwise, depending on the weapon it might take a couple of seconds. Also like Gears, there are areas where you can crouch behind cover, but you can’t lean out of cover as you could in Gears. Taking cover whether crouching behind objects or using a building to give you some space is just about required in some areas lest the drones and variety of enemies overwhelm you.
During each mission, optional side objectives that are never too far out of your way are offered, and there is some reward for ‘finding the edges’ of the map, i.e exploring to find hidden picks up that include comicbook artwork and alternate character skins and character-specific weapon skins. These are neat, and surely count towards Trophies, and it does help give the game a little more replay value as well.
As far as presentation goes, I really liked the cel-shaded look; to me that never really ages, even going back twenty-plus years to games like Jet Set Radio. Furthermore, GI Joe media for me was always animated or comicbook (I didn’t watch the live action movies). The cel-shaded look stirs that animated look nostalgia nicely, and the comicbook style cutscenes are fitting. The voiceovers are what they are; not original to the cartoon voice actors for sure, and not terrible, but still a little cringe-worthy. Still, I’ll take this over not having any voiceovers at all.
The sum of the parts makes for a game that’s very much aimed at GI Joe fans, and that’s great. There are a lot of fan service games out there, most of which have no interest from me, but this one did. Between that nostalgia and innate interest, and recognizing very early on that this game is by far best played with a couch co-op buddy, GI Joe Operation Blackout is fun in spurts. I enjoyed the different feel to the characters and the story was entertaining as well. There’s a lot of pretty good elements to the game, but repetitive level design and gameplay, blah AI, and aiming woes taint the experience considerably — not necessarily to deal-breaker territory, but just proceed with caution.
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