Game Reviews

Men in Black 3

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Men in Black 3
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| Men in Black 3

The Men in Black films are blockbusters through and through. They're popcorn movies that deal in high octane thrills and spills rather than intimate drama, all big budget special effects and characters drawn in the broadest possible brush strokes.

Which makes Gameloft's decision to turn its official iOS adaptation of Men in Black 3 into a freemium agency-management sim all the stranger.

Galaxy dividend-ers

You start the game as a rookie agent, and you end up - as you might expect - embroiled in a plot to destroy the earth. Rather than tackling the threat head-on, though, you'll spend a lot of your time managing the resources of the MiB agency.

After all, how can you tackle a time travelling alien menace without a plant shop installed at HQ? As well as building up the revenue streams and facilities at the office, you'll be sent out on a variety of missions.

These usually take the form of a brief text exchange between a couple of characters, then a dull fight that involves little more than tapping on some bad guys and hoping they die before you do.

Every action you perform takes time and energy, but - this being a freemium title - you can spend some T-pulse power, topped up with real life cash, to speed things up.

Neuralyze me

The mixture of seemingly urgent missions and deciding where you should put the new locker room in the MiB offices is a jarring one, and really doesn't make the best use out of the Men in Black licence.

Add to that the facts that combat is boring and the prices you have to pay for extras and new abilities are a little on the steep side to begin with and what you're left with is a clumsy game without a real identity.

The management side of things is decent enough, and a game focused on building up the agency after an attack might have made much more sense.

As it is, the division of your time makes for a flat experience that even die hard fans of the series are going to find tough to love.

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Men in Black 3

A bad case of identity crisis, Men in Black 3's lack of focus leads to an underwhelming experience on both the action and simulation fronts
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.