Making a movie out of Watchmen is a difficult enough task. But a videogame?
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ groundbreaking graphic novel is densely packed with fascinating characters and deep back story. The film, to be released Friday, does an admirable job of packing as much of this as possible into two hours and forty minutes. Watchmen: The End Is Nigh, a downloadable game released Wednesday for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 (reviewed), runs about as long as the movie, but does significantly less with the allotted time.
Watchmen is a beat-’em-up game in which the object is to pummel a succession of near-identical foes into a bloody mess. This is not per se a bad idea: The comic book careers of masked vigilantes Nite Owl and Rorschach mostly involved the recursive face-bashing of criminals, so the genre does fit the source material. It’s just never very much fun.
The game’s graphics are a pastiche of realism and comic book imagery — the story is told between levels in the style of the Watchmen motion comics, but the gameplay is realistic 3-D, based on visuals from the film. Neither are particularly attractive: The comic segments are generic and barely animated, and the 3-D often looks like a last-generation game. While the graphics look pretty in still pictures, the animation is never realistic, the camerawork is boring and the flashy special effects are … well, there aren’t any.
With a thin plot and uneven graphic design, it falls on Watchmen‘s gameplay to save the experience, which it does not do. I usually like beat-’em-ups in the style of Double Dragon and Final Fight, although contemporary attempts to remake them rarely work out. By not being completely awful, Watchmen is a better game than, for example, the last time somebody attempted to remake Final Fight. But putting on Rorschach’s mask and driving a stolen police baton into someone’s skull should be much more fun than this. You don’t feel the impact of the blows. There’s no joy in throwing one gang member into another.
You can choose to play as Rorschach or Nite Owl, or two can play simultaneously. There isn’t much difference between the characters — Nite Owl has the use of his electrified owl suit, and Rorschach can pick up and use found weapons, but these are merely means to similar ends. Occasionally, the pair splits up, meaning that you’ll experience slightly different parts of each level depending on which you choose to play.
The game requires very little in the way of strategy or timing — just mashing on the attack buttons is more than enough to get you through half the game. At that point, more and more enemies start piling on you, and getting cheap-shotted in the back is an excellent way to die (and be booted out to a long loading screen while you wait for the exact same level you were just in to be reloaded).
At this point, I began looking for a way to navigate the piles of enemies. Quickly I realized that just mashing the right bumper and light attack button simultaneously made me unstoppable. When no enemies were near, I would dodge and roll around. When they appeared, I would automatically disarm them. When they attacked, I would counterattack them with a powerful blow. All this because jamming on those two buttons causes a variety of context-sensitive actions to automatically execute with perfect accuracy. Rorschach, improbably, rolled and spun across the screen, fluidly stealing weapons, breaking arms, rolling again: a graceful violent dance of invincibility.
This is the sort of absence of polish that defines The End Is Nigh. A Watchmen game doesn’t need to be a grand, story-driven epic. But it should have been a better take on the genre than this.
Images courtesy Warner Bros.
WIRED You get to be Rorschach for a couple hours
TIRED Awkward, unpolished animation and graphics, highly repetitive, shallow
$20, Warner Bros.
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