"With great power," says Spider-Man's uncle, "comes great responsibility." "But ah," replies Lord Acton, more than a century before, in a different country, and in real life, "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
It's a dichotomy, for sure.
The
Spider-Man films have dealt with power's corrupting influence, but Spidey always predictably turns out to be unimpeachable.
Not so with fellow comic book character Wesley Gibson, star of the Mark Millar comics and forthcoming film
Wanted. As soon as Wes learns that he's heir to an existence as a high-powered killer, he discards his girlfriend and job like old shoes and dives into his murderous new life.
That's the background and it's an interesting one. Instead of being the usual goody two-shoes, Wes is an anti-hero, killing trendily without insight or remorse, and I-play's forthcoming game of the movie looks to be as interesting in gameplay terms as the film is in playing with character conventions.
Naturally, you play as Wes, an ultra-acrobatic figure akin to the
Prince of Persia. On the face of it
Wanted is a fairly bog-standard platformer. You run left and right with '4' and '6', jump with '2', crouch with '8', and fire your gun with '5'. Jump too short and you'll grab onto a ledge and pull yourself up, tumbling gymnastically onto solid ground.
Aside from reasonable dialogue and some intricately detailed comic book graphics, including occasional frame-in-frame shots, it's not at all dissimilar to
Prince of Persia or
Pirates of the Caribbean. The twist, however, is that the gameplay keeps changing.
Sometimes, instead of propelling Wes along yourself, you just sit back and watch him run on rails. You job goes from puppeteering to telling the full-pelt Wes when to jump and duck, like a stripped-down version of the excellent
Playman Extreme Running.
And sometimes, Wes stays on rails, but you can shoot. Each baddy onscreen is represented by a number, and you have to press the corresponding key in good time to fire. These sections are a bit like a rhythm-action game, with the added twist that if you mis-time a shot you can actually bend the bullet around in mid-air.
The action even goes slow motion when it all kicks off, like in a Jet Li film, and you can earn style points by killing baddies in interesting ways (although I never managed to do this in my time with the game) as well as trophies for anti-heroic things like 'first blood' and 'butchery'.
Of course, a platform game based on a film is never going to win prizes for innovation, but
Wanted looks like it may well breathe at least a wisp or two of fresh air into the musty platform/film conversion genre, as long as it stands up to the bout of sustained scrutiny we'll be subjecting it to in the coming weeks.
If you click 'Track It!', you'll get to read the review.
