Tech Olive

When I heard of the release of a Watchmen game, I figured it would be another lame adaptation from the comics to the movie and finally to a game. I was pleasantly surprised when I found that it is actually a prequel to not only the movie, but also the comic’s storyline.

At the start of the game, you choose one of the two available characters to play through the game; Rorschach or Nite Owl.

The game starts out quite abruptly, throwing you into a prison that seems to be having power issues and as a result of this, the prisoners are slowly overpowering the guards. The Watchmen go into the prison, against the warden’s wishes, to fix the power problems and beat any loose prisoners senseless. That’s pretty much it for the first level.

As you make your way through the levels, you collect upgrades to your fighting abilities; new combos, new counter-attacks and so on. One of the things that is cool about the game is at the beginning of each level, you get to choose which character you want to play and of course each character has different attacks and combo moves.

If there is one thing that Watchmen has going for it, it would be the graphics. Everything is very gritty and the style is great. Although the levels can feel a bit repetitive, they look nice enough to keep you distracted. The controls are simple enough, with slightly more advanced attack combos which are complicated at the start, but become easier to perform. Really though, the button-mashing technique works well enough to get you through the hordes of baddies you will encounter.

Watchmen also features co-op, but only offline split-screen. Played with mouse/keyboard and a controller, or two controllers. No LAN/Internet play is available.

Everything feels very cloned and reminds me of the action games of a few years ago and the arcade “beat ‘em up” games. The game has a storyline, of course, but it is nothing of substance, it’s better to look at this game as a mindless fighting game where the only objective is to remove the teeth from the mouths of the mobs of nameless goons and henchmen you’ll come across. By no means does this add up to Watchmen being a bad game, but it can leave some to be desired. However, for fans of random beat ‘em up games, you will love Watchmen.

Scores

- Graphics: 9
With fantastic lighting and character models, Watchmen makes for great eye candy.

- Storyline: 5
Although the comic’s storyline is quite epic, the game’s storyline is rather bland. Easily ignored and quickly forgotten.

- Gameplay: 8
The gameplay is as straight forward and simple as it gets, which suits the style of the game nicely.

- Presentation: 6
You cannot change graphics settings while in-game, but only with a config window that opens before running the game each time. Otherwise, everything is pretty solid and well done.

- Lasting Appeal: 4
Most beat ‘em up games are alike. They are great fun the first time through, but further attempts will feel very repetitive.

Overall: 6 Olives