A Few Thoughts on 24: The Game (2006) With the Live Another Day revival on the horizon, it’s interesting now to reflect what a phenomenon 24 was a decade ago. Though the show’s stature was eventually diminished by a flimsy sixth season and a general sense of repetition, at its height it was as successful a series as FOX had ever put out. Unsurprisingly, this led to a lot of merchandising, including this PS2-exclusive video game. Games based on television shows probably have an even worse reputation than movie-inspired titles—outside of a few decent Star Trek, Buffy and Simpsons games (and Obsidian’s recently-released South Park: The Stick of Truth), I’m struggling to think of many that would even qualify as average. Developed by Sony’s Cambridge studio and published by 2K, 24: The Game won’t be joining that group, though it’s less of a cheap cash-in than one might expect. On the contrary, the game is as ambitious as it is unrefined. Serving as a sort of belated sequel to Day Two (and setting up characters who would appear in Day Three), 24: The Game’s story is actually one of its strongest assets. I wouldn’t describe myself as a big fan of the show, so I’m not particularly concerned with its canon (especially since half of the characters here are going to be killed off within a few seasons anyway). The plot shares some of its weaknesses with the show in general: no contrivance or coincidence to too extreme to justify another twist, the story has a sort of goofy fixation with setting up “enhanced interrogation” scenes and the obstructionist bureaucrats (namely Ryan Chappelle) can be a bit much. Jack Bauer’s relationship with the game’s villain, who once served under his command in Special Ops, is also poorly developed. Villainous old acquaintances whom the hero has never mentioned before always feel pulled out of a hat, and the bad guy here never makes use of his history with Jack in an interesting way. You don’t have to know someone particularly well to guess that kidnapping their daughter will give you leverage over them. That said, by video games standards, the story of 24: The Game is pretty damn thrilling and was enough to keep me playing from beginning to end. If you’re a fan of the show, then the story here is going to be a real treat for you. As often occurs in 24, there’s a successful terrorist attack before the final act, and the calamity here is used to great effect (though the magnitude of the event opens up questions about why people aren’t still talking about it at the beginning of Day Three). It also helps that the cutscenes nail the visual style of the show, from the nervous cinematography to the famous split-screens. These pre-rendered sequences are covered in bloom lighting and depth of field effects that the in-game engine doesn’t actually support, but nonetheless fit very nicely with the gameplay graphics. You’ll also get to see a lot of the ticking clock, with a couple of missions grouped in each hour (this also means you’ll get to hear Kiefer Sutherland saying “The following takes place…” twenty-four times). As the game is only around eight hours long (half the length of a season and a third of a full day), there is obviously a good deal of time compression going on, but a continual shuffling of protagonists does a fine job disguising this. As you may have gathered by now, 24: The Game does a better job with its non-interactive elements than its actual gameplay. At its core, the game is a third-person shooter with driving sequences, interrogations and a ton of hacking mini-games (there are also some mini-games involving isolating radio frequencies and locating snipers, but they’re effectively the same thing). As a shooter, the game is mediocre. You press the left button to lock on to an enemy and the right one to fire, which is fine in theory, but like with many games that use this system, it can be difficult to target your intended enemy in a room full of bad guys. You can snap the right stick left or right to select new targets, but the game has an uncanny knack for picking the last enemy you wanted to lock on to, forcing you to take unneeded hits as you keep flicking the control stick—unlike James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing, you can’t choose your target from the safety of cover. Speaking of cover, it’s terrible. You can only go into cover when the game prompts you to, and the prompts only appear for about a third of the objects in the environment. Fortunately, until the final two hours (there’s a huge difficulty spike in Hour 23), cover isn’t really necessary, as the brain-dead enemies will go down quickly. The lack of frustration before the finale at least prevents these sections from overstaying their welcome. There are also some stealth missions, most of which come across as quite primitive and scripted. Poor enemy AI has guards chasing after you, guns drawn, then forgetting about your existence and returning to their old patrol routes moments later. Other times, they’ll literally walk right over their allies’ bodies without noticing a thing. However, I did enjoy a mid-game “social stealth” mission that has Jack taking part in a tour of a government facility, stealing ID cards and passwords before quickly returning to the group without anyone noticing. An overhead map with enemies clearly marked on it also makes the stealth interludes more playable, if a little pointlessly easy. The driving sequences are probably the game’s biggest missed opportunity. Sony’s Cambridge studio created a fairly large recreation of Los Angeles to drive around in, but virtually all of the missions are chases or timed point-A-to-point-B affairs. You never get a chance to explore the city at your leisure; I’d be surprised if a third of the streets in the game were used for anything. Driving and walking are handled on the same engine, so you can get out of your vehicle and hijack another (as in Grand Theft Auto), but again, there’s just no incentive or time to do so. I’m not saying the game needed side missions (that would have detracted from the focused plotline), but the open world here feels like a waste. On top of that, the handling of the vehicles just isn’t any good—it’s neither enjoyably arcade-like nor satisfyingly realistic. Cars in the game slide all over the place, alternately understeering and oversteering in an unpredictable fashion. There’s zero sensation of speed, making it feel as if vehicles max out at forty miles per hour. Enemy drivers are also complete morons who will continually ram into you, Driver 1999-style, until they explode. Lastly, there are the mini-games, most of which involve connecting circuits and unscrambling passwords. These perform as advertised, but don’t really evolve over the course of the story and quickly become repetitious. The interrogations are more memorable, with CTU members alternating between aggressive and calming statements in an attempt to hit their subject’s sweet spot. This is cool at first, but soon begins to resemble a serious version of the “good cop, bad cop” scene from the Pink Panther reboot—like with Cole Phelps in L.A. Noire and Commander Sheppard in some playthroughs of Mass Effect, Bauer sometimes comes across as suffering from a dissociative identity disorder. Graphically, 24: The Game looks great in its cutscenes, decent in its screenshots, and middling in motion. This is somewhat surprising given that SCE Cambridge was responsible for some of the best “tech demo” games on the PS2 (like Primal and Ghosthunter), but the character animations just drag the whole thing down. Character movement appears to be stiff and awkward, and dying enemies seem to be missing a couple of frames (reminding me of some of the shooters I’ve played for the PS1). The game doesn’t look awful, but it doesn’t look good either. At least the voice acting is strong. You’ll get to play as Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), Chase Edmunds (James Badge Dale), Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard), Michelle Dessler (Reiko Aylesworth), Kim Bauer (Elisha Cuthbert), Adam Kaufman (Zachary Quinto) and two random technicians, all of whom are well-performed. Dennis Haysbert and Daniel Dae Kim also have minor roles, and the game contains the penultimate credited performance of Andreas Katsulas (G’Kar on Babylon 5), who plays the corrupt Californian governor (Katsulas died later that year). Overall, 24: The Game is so consistently problematic as an actual video game that it’s difficult to recommend. That said, I hesitate to entirely write this off as a “for the fans only” experience. I’m a casual 24 viewer at best, but still ultimately had fun with the game due to its fast-paced narrative. I’d say the game is less “for the fans only” than it is for those seeking an exciting story who don’t mind massively unpolished (but usually quite easy) gameplay. Of course, there are more noteworthy games along those lines on newer consoles (such as Alpha Protocol, which also has RPG components and a nonlinear narrative) and the spirit of 24 can be found in the recent Splinter Cell games, which are more polished in every respect. 24: The Game, then, isn’t an underappreciated sleeper title any more than it is a must-play. In spite of itself, though, it is kinda fun. 5/10
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 19:43:26 +0000
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