Mini Review – Captain America: Super Soldier

Action/Fighting

Yield to the shield.

Rich

Another day, another film tie-in.  Quite why they are making a movie of Marvel’s least interesting hero is beyond me but rules are rules and that means a heroic tie-in with lots of leaping about and punching is the order of the day.  Now it’d be very easy to just to just say ‘blah blah generic movie tie-in bollocks blah’ about Captain America because that’s really what it is but, having completed the game just a few minutes ago, I find myself not completely hating the game.  I just don’t like it that much either.

Captain America puts you in the shoes of the titular not-super hero as he takes on the mighty forces of Hydra – basically nazis without the licensing agreements – and sees you doing a lot of punching and a bit of jumping about.  If you want your points of reference, the combat is Hellboy or Spider-Man (albeit with a lot less moves).  You’ll repeatedly run into groups made up of one of the four or five distinct types of enemy on offer (yes, that’s not very many) and will twat them with your basic moveset and the occasional special attack.  There’s nothing here that you haven’t seen before.  Does it work?  Yes (although similar games have a much better ‘flow’ to the combat).  Does it do anything special?  No.  Well, you’ve got a shield that you can fling at enemies and, with the right timing, can send bullets back to where they came from.

The platforming sections, of which there are probably too many, take a leaf out of Assassin’s Creed‘s book.  That is to say that Cappy flings himself around like Lara Croft at the Olympics, performing all manner of tricky stunts but you don’t really do anything apart from occasionally press A to help him along.  As such these sequences feel like very empty QTE cutscenes.  Still, fans of QTEs (get the fuck out) are catered for by the various ones that pop up during boss battles.

Presentation is also equally ordinary, with functional graphics and forgetable sound and music which conspire to make Captain America one of the most entirely blaverage games on the 360.  The lack of creativity is evident throughout with the game not bothering to explain the main character’s backstory at all and all the action taking part in some of the most bland environments you’ve seen this side of Gears of Poland.

Twatting fake nazis is my superpower.

On the plus side, the developers have catered for any of your gamerscore whores out there.  Sure, there’s far too many collectables in there but you can always revisit areas (made even easier thanks to a nifty/niffy sewer network) and they even let you miss a few collectables on the way.  The game isn’t offensively long either, clocking in at around ten hours (when played on Medium difficulty).  Also, despite having a few boss battles, none of them are game-stoppingly difficult either which is to the game’s credit.

So there you have it.  This is as ordinary a game as you’ll find on the 360.  It gets very little wrong but it takes absolutely no risks along the way.  With no replay value and no multiplayer modes, Captain America gets filed away firmly in the ‘to rent if there’s nothing else available’ bracket.  It’s one of the least hateful film tie-ins out there but that’s as faint as praise can get.

Rating: 5/10