Two reviews in one day? Well, I was bored at work last night, and I had two games to review… deal with it.
OK, so now part two of the review day. It’s Prison Break: The Conspiracy. Why did I even bother, you ask? Well, I was always a fan of the show, and always had it on the back-burner of games to play… eventually. Well, I had a break in games, and Joe was threatening pain upon my if I played Mass Effect 2 again… so I thought… why not just GameFly it and check it out. So there. That’s the story. Now, onto the review.
The game is Prison Break: The Conspiracy (from here on known as PB as I don’t want to keep typing that.) PB was originally released in March of 2010, and as the name suggests, is based on the TV show, Prison Break. It was originally developed by Brash Entertainment, before they went under and then it was picked up by ZootFly and they finished it. If ZootFly sounds familiar, it is because they were the devs who released that awesome Ghostbusters game footage on Youtube a few years ago, got everyone excited, and then Terminal Reality actually made the game.
The jist of the game is this. You are Tom Paxton, an agent of “The Company.” Fans of the show will already know what I’m talking about. The Company are this shadow government group who runs the world, and they are the primary bad guys of the show. In the opening events of Season 1 of the show, main-character Michael Scofield “robs” a bank and gets sent to prison to free his brother. The Company doesn’t know all the details, but they think strange things are afoot, so they send you in to investigate.
The game is basically a series of MMO style fetch quests, that play out as linear stealth-based segments with GTA-esque fist-fighting to break it up on occasion. You need info? Someone has that info, but needs something in return. Go get this guy a shiv, and he will get you the info. You then have to sneak around in places, get the shiv and return to the “quest giver/rapist” to continue. Rinse and repeat for the majority of the game. Every now and then, you will get into a fight with someone. Who you ask? Usually it’s the only guy blocking your path. I compare it to GTA San Andreas/IV as it’s the only game I thought of at the time. Punch/Heavy punch/block/and timed reversals are your fighting moves. Knock people out, then move on with sneaking around.
The Good:
Believe it or not, this game isn’t ALL bad, there are a few redeeming qualities here. Fans of the show won’t mind all of the suck, as it is FULL of references to the first season of the show (when the game takes place.) Events they remember from the show happen throughout the course of the game. The game has the theme song from the show playing through most of it, and that weird “zooming around” camera thing when the show goes to commercial happens in between loads. Speaking of loads, the game has a pretty quick load time to it, something a lot of games nowadays are lacking on. If you die/are caught/whatever and need to re-load a checkpoint (which are very frequent, I might add,) it is usually under 2-5 seconds. One other technical note here, I only ran into one bug for the entire game. My character froze in place one time, in which I had to re-load a checkpoint. It was a quick reload, and I had to play for about 20 seconds to get back to where I was again, and it played fine the second time.
This will also go under the bad, but SOME of the voicework is actually pretty good. Most of the cast from the show (Michael, Linc, Sucre, T-Bag, C-Note, Abruzzi, Bellic) are in the game doing their own voices, and it sounds as it should. The amount of fan-service is what I’m trying to express here, as this now covers “the good.”
The Bad:
Now, this game received a LOT of bad reviews when it was released. I’m not going to say it was a horrible game, I didn’t hate it, I wasn’t angry as if I just lost hours of life after playing it… but it wasn’t that good of a game either. Starting off with the other half of voicework. Actor Amaury Nolasco plays his character, Fernando Sucre, in the game. I don’t know if he was just sick that day, or the director just didn’t know what was going on at the time (ZootFly is Slovenian… who knows) but he just sounds… weird… like his voice is way too high-pitched and it sounds like they got a bad voice actor to phone it in.
Also, they filled the game with cast members and characters from the show… and then there is Dr. Sara Tancredi, played by The Walking Dead’s Sarah Wayne Callies in the show… and some weird sounding blonde girl in the game. It wasn’t her voice, and it isn’t her character model. If you couldn’t sign her on, don’t include her in the game. Put some other doctor in her place. Tom Paxton (your character) wasn’t in the show, so he doesn’t necessarily need to interact with Dr. Tancredi… I’m sure there are other doctors at the prison he could get his checkup from.
This game also has some really crappy camera angles in it. For one, the camera is WAY too close to your character. He takes up a lot of the screen at all times. I kept wanting to do some kind of zoom-out on him, kind of like in Arkham Asylum when you glide in the air and the camera zooms in WAY too much. And speaking of visuals… this is not a pretty game. The character models are really don’t have a lot of detail. You can make out who everyone is, sure… but, you are kinda wondering what the actors thought of their in-game model after seeing them. I’m thinking it was something like “wait… that’s me?”
Visuals aside, this is a VERY repetitive game. As I mentioned before, it is one sneaking around mission after another, that’s all you do. And, (I’m sure the obvious reaction would be “duh, you are in prison, idiot”) it kinda sucks seeing the same environments over and over again. Referring back to Arkham Asylum again, you unlock new areas through the course of the game to break it up. In PB, you just keep going through the same places over and over again.
And with all of this sneaking around, you would think the devs would have made the guard AI a little better. When in a “restricted area” which puts you into “sneaking mode,” as long as you don’t run, you can sneak right beside/behind a guard and they won’t know you are there. At times, I walked across a hallway about 10 feet in front of a guard, and as long as I didn’t wait there for about 8-10 seconds, they didn’t react to me at all. This makes for a very unchallenging game.
All in all, PB is not a great/must-play game, but it is also not a terrible game. Fans of the show will overlook the flaws with the game to be able to get another view on the story of the show. Also, gamers will expect to lower their standards for video games based on TV shows. I wasn’t expecting a great game, so I wasn’t terribly offended by it.
Nerd Junkies Review – 5/10
-A game for fans of the show… but no one else
-It could have used more gameplay elements than constant sneaking around the same environments over and over again
Related Posts:
- Review: Brink If you follow the game news all the time like...
- Review: Child of Eden Child of Eden is the game that a lot of...
- Review: Duke Nukem Forever Finally, after countless delays, and over a decade of development...
- Review: Homefront A lot of game reviews out there are painting Homefront...
- Review: L.A. Noire L.A. Noire is the latest game put out by Rockstar...
