Stormbreaker
Anyone else remember the cartoon James Bond Jr.? Anyone?
Tags: Stormbreaker Categories: GBA Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Michael Hanning on Nov 2nd, 2006
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Stormbreaker (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
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Do you remember Metal Gear? Not the sleek 3D one that wowed us all in the days of the PlayStation, but the Metal Gear kicking it old-school in the days of the NES. Apparently someone does, because Alex Rider: Stormbreaker is more or less a retread of the early days of Solid Snake, except with a dangerously undertrained teenager working for the British government instead. Why they didn’t just save the money and license the James Bond Jr. cartoon, I don’t know.
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The series sees young Alex Rider taking over for his uncle as a spy whose main spy duty is infiltrating compounds, apparently. True to form, in your quest to see what exactly the villain is up to you’ll have to sneak around stages and find color-coded keys to color-coded doors. Enemies will ignore you as long as they aren’t looking in a straight line at you, leaving you to knock out surveillance bugs and find cards with relative impunity. Gameplay is presented from an isometric viewpoint above Alex’s head, giving you a top-down view of the level. It’s not particularly pretty, but it works.
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When you finally encounter guards, combat is handled with the A and B buttons – one punches, one kicks, mashing them both at the same time performs a throw. It’s not too sensitive and the system doesn’t give you a really clear idea of when you land a hit – to be honest, you may rely on doing nothing but throws because those are the only hits that seem to make a difference to your enemy. This only gets worse when your enemies start carrying guns and you have to figure out how to zigzag your way over to them or just run away and hope they forget you. To mix this up you also get to mess with his spy gadgets, presented to you randomly between missions. Some just open up new doors, some stun enemies or show you what’s going on ahead of you. It’s a pretty straightforward affair that loses the intricacies of the movie’s plot, or even the plot shown by the DS version of the same game. As long as you keep finding keycards to the next door the game will progress along neatly on its own with a few simplified pieces of the plot to distract you.
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Unfortunately, the game doesn’t look all that good for the GBA. Sprites are pretty small and lack detail, the items and background objects are pixilated and just look sort of out of place. They’re good for hiding behind, which is all a game like this really needs from its background objects, but given the amount of care given to the DS version of Alex Rider this is something of a disappointment. It can’t be explained away by the system, either, because there are plenty of great-looking games for the DS out there.
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The Game Boy Advance version of Alex Rider is a game that might have been looked more favorably upon early in the system’s life cycle, but unfortunately just doesn’t compare to what the system is offering now, let alone the excellent DS game based on the same movie. It’s not that much of a larger investment for a much better game to pick up the DS version, leaving not many reasons to buy this version of Stormbreaker. Unless you really, really miss the NES version of Metal Gear.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ Throwback to the days of Metal Gear + Some of the spy gadgets are neat |
4.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- Doesn't look good - Doesn't really play that well - DS version much better. |
|
| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| If you have to choose, buy the DS version instead. There are better games for the GBA. | |
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Tags: Stormbreaker
Posted by Michael Hanning on Nov 2nd, 2006 and is filed under GBA Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
