After five novels and a trilogy of successful movies, the amnesia-afflicted assassin, Jason Bourne, has finally infiltrated the video gaming scene. While the game takes the core character, it will not be directly based off any particular novel or movie, though not quite in the manner that movies are loose translations of the novels. So the Jason Bourne that you play is not the same as the one played by Matt Damon, but there will be similarities. We're told that fans are likely to recognise a lot of the action from The Bourne Identity and other movies, and that the story will essentially be reliving the events leading up to Bourne's memory loss, as well as events that happened after it.
You'll need to use everything at your disposal...
We got to take a look at three levels from within the game. The first was a level that placed you in an Embassy (which is very similar to the early scene from The Bourne Identity), and it's just been uncovered that you're a wanted man. The sequence isn't very long but it's very fast and quite an eye-opening introduction to the game. Your forced to run away and avoid as much fire as possible. Along the way, you get into a few fist fights, which can't be avoided, and you're faced with a number of "quick action events" (also known as quick time events). We're informed that this level had more then most, and more hard-fails so we shouldn't think that the game will be chock-full of them. However, if you're sick of this gameplay mechanic, you might get annoyed, despite what seems to be a reasonable implementation.
After the exhilaration of the escape, which included fighting off guards while being targeted by snipers, we were placed in a more conventional level. It was a mission that was meant to take place two days before the Wombosi assassination, where we need to chase down a fugitive. The chase went through a subway, an airport and ended in a plane. Through this, we got more time to get used to the fighting mechanics, which are simple but have well-implemented takedowns (which turn environmental surroundings into weapons) and the shooting and covering systems. While reminiscent of a streamlined Gears of War or Uncharted, the system worked well and we were pulling off head shots in no time.
The last level that we saw was a driving mission, though we only got a very limited time with it. Speeding around the streets of what looked to be an incarnation of Paris in a Mini Cooper appeared to be very simple, as the controls were heavily arcade orientated. It was doing a surprising amount of damage for a small car, and we were caught off guard when a quick-time event appeared while we were driving to the next objective point.
... As well as your environments.
There are three things that struck us with The Bourne Conspiracy, in terms of visuals. Firstly, in an age where games tend to be derided for not being at the cutting edge of technology, it's an interesting choice that the developers have chosen to focus on aspects such as transition animations and environment effects, rather then just pure polygonal output. This leads to our second point, in that we feel that this is a good decision. Namely because it's one of the smoothest running games in an age where games will then get derided for having technical shortcomings. And thirdly, the game had made good use of the Paul Greengrass 'shaky-cam' from the Bourne movies, as it never felt too uncomfortable and made the game stand-out.
From directly working with the Ludlum estate, to working with fight choreographer Jeff Imada, it seems that High Moon Studios have got the Bourne look and feel almost perfect. Furthermore, they have gone to great lengths to making sure the character isn't mistaken for any token action game hero or even someone like James Bond. The Bourne Conspiracy doesn't do a lot that hasn't been done before, but it seems so far to be put into a package that looks like it will be very faithful to the source material and a solid and fun game to boot.
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