Game Reviews

Men In Black 3: The Mobile Game

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Men In Black 3: The Mobile Game
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True story: Will Smith once made a cup of tea for a friend of mine. Apparently, the global superstar is not only an accomplished actor, producer, and rapper, but he also makes an excellent brew.

But even Will Smith isn't perfect - he makes a terrible video game character.

Men In Black 3: The Mobile Game casts you as Agent J, the slick operative that Smith has brought to life across three light-hearted science-fiction blockbusters.

And by the end of the game you'll have grown to hate this character and every repetitive, disconnected level you've had to follow him into.

Galaxy defenders

A side-scrolling shooter based on the movie's time-travelling storyline, MIB 3 borrows the premise, locations, and characters of the series without inheriting any of its humour or warmth.

That said, the shooting itself is perfectly competent, even if the rather generous auto-aim obviates the need for particularly considered blasting.

You can clear rooms full of extraterrestrial enemies by simply holding the 'fire' button, but your sci-fi arsenal packs a pyrotechnic punch, and alien adversaries crumple pleasingly in your wake.

Of course, the game's inter-species shootouts might have impressed a little more if the game was able to produce sound effects with any sort of consistency. Weirdly, Agent J's sci-fi arsenal is sporadically muted, and the background music will occasionally fade away too.

Even climatic boss battles are affected, and we played through some of MIB's most cinematic sequences in stony silence.

Won't let you remember

Such glitches are immersion-shattering, but forgivable. Much more troublesome are the game's dreadful controls, which are consistently wonky, frequently unresponsive, and occasionally infuriating.

Playing on a touchscreen handset, MIB's virtual D-pad is just appallingly spongy and inaccurate, while the on-screen buttons respond to your prods only about 70 per cent of the time.

Which makes the decision to liberally sprinkle MIB's campaign with platforming sections all the more baffling.

These gauntlets prove to be challenging exercises in anger-management, demanding a level of precision that the game's decrepit controls simply can't provide, and punishing your inevitable shortcomings with an abundance instakill falls.

At its very best, Men In Black 3: The Mobile Game is an diverting dose of adequacy. But glitches, difficulty spikes, and terrible controls all undermine this distinctly average foundation.

Men In Black 3: The Mobile Game

A workmanlike effort that's undone by a marriage of woeful controls and instakill platforming section, Men In Black 3 quickly shifts from uninspired to infuriating
Score
James Nouch
James Nouch
PocketGamer.biz's news editor 2012-2013