Review by: Tony Mitera

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is an awful game. It’s a broken mess of a game tacked together by shoddy gameplay mechanics. Put bluntly, the game is effectively a case study on how not to do a movie-based game.

The game borrows heavily from the movie in its stylings and characters, letting you play as one of many of the Joes that appear in the movie as well as some of those who were not. It can be played cooperatively, but in the event that you go it alone the AI takes the reins of the second Joe while you get down to business. Much of the gameplay is based around running through levels and shooting enemies in a manner similar to what a 3D Contra game would be like.

Each Joe has unique abilities, which can be used three times, and are replenished either by killing enemies or picking up powerups. These abilities vary greatly in how useful they are from Joe to Joe, and some are geared towards use against a group of foes while others do great single-target damage. As you play you build up a meter at the top of the screen that when full allows you and your partner to suddenly transform into wearing Accelerator Suits. During this short time you are invincible and can lay down an absolutely devastating amount of firepower down on your enemies, so it is best used either when you are near death or during boss fights.

The gameplay has a bevy of flaws such as the camera control or rather the lack thereof. The game’s camera system often makes very little sense, and just as often is fully capable of making you shoot enemies that are off screen or move towards the camera without the foggiest idea of where you are headed. There are simply too many points where you will want to move the camera but cannot, whether it is to look around for any pickups that you might have missed or to scan for any remaining enemies or the path forward.

Attacking enemies is done via a fully automated aiming system that just has you locking on to a specific enemy to draw some fire down on them. You will automatically lock onto the first enemy you find, and can either kill them and let the game target a new foe automatically or try to manually switch targets by flicking the right stick in their direction. More often than not however the targeting system becomes confused as to what you actually want to do, and either targets the wrong enemy or worse yet target a points cube rather than the tank rolling up on you. The automated nature of the targeting system means that for the most part when you are just fighting waves of weak enemies you literally have to do little more than hold down the right trigger and wiggle the left stick a bit. However, since the targeting doesn’t lead your shots it is impossible to shoot anything that is moving, and since you cannot use any form of manual aiming there are many times where you will hold your fire until an enemy stops moving just so you can shoot them twenty feet away.

Given how woefully ineffective your fire can be in those scenarios it won’t help matter much that the game features some of the most anemic sound effects around. Assault rifles and chainguns make little more than uninspiring ‘pew-pew’ noises of the grade that you can find on any dollar store toy gun. Coupled with some voice acting where you will be hard pressed to determine if the actors are delivering their lines or chewing them and you have an audio side of the proceedings that is almost fully uninspiring. Only the sound track that is played when you use the Accelerator Suits is the type of gung-ho heroic music that a game of the franchise should have, but it is one small diamond found in a whole lot of rough.