Review by Tom Mimnagh
UK Certification 12 | UK RRP £34.99 | Region PAL | Developer Double Helix | Publisher Warner Bros. Interactive
Green Lantern, starring Ryan Reynolds, was released in cinemas this week to a less than warm critical reaction. Whether this is the same at the box office remains to be seen. However, as is de rigueur for any major Hollywood blockbuster of recent times, especially those with comic book roots, the accompanying video game has hit the shelves.
As a rule, video game tie-ins to successful – or sometimes unsuccessful – movies, tend to be fairly awful. Often the game feels half finished, or certainly half-arsed. Obviously the selling point is the movie, and the franchising is based around that, and is therefore, at least from the studio’s point of view, secondary. So the question that begs asking is whether Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters follows the same trend?
Well, the answer is yes, but not to the extent you might expect.
The story kicks off on Oa, where Hal Jordan, Sinestro, and Kilowog are discussing the death of Abin Sur with his son, when the Manhunters, a race of android former peacekeepers, now enemies of the Green Lanterns, attack Oa. Jordan must then fight them to save the planet, and in the process he unearths some startling revelations, before battling them across the universe.
Rise of the Manhunters is not as lazily put together as some movie tie-ins. The controls are a tiny bit clunky, and at times the view point of the player is unhelpfully obscured during fights with the larger Manhunters. Also, it can be difficult to discern the position of your character during fights with multiple enemies, as there is sometimes too much happening on screen, and he can be obscured by his own offence and those of the Manhunters attacking him. However, these are relatively minor gameplay issues, and for the most part the characters' movements are responsive and fluid and fun to play with.
The game is excellent graphically, from the opening cut-scene to the actual in-game graphics, it is of an excellent standard. The constructs used by Jordan are quite fun and there is a surprisingly large variety of imaginary objects he can utilise, including a Gatling gun and a baseball bat, but also the more traditional sword and whip. Different levels require different constructs, but being able to have 8 different items armed at once makes for a varied and unpredictable attack. At times it feels similar to the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games, which can only be considered a good thing.
However, despite these positives, much like most movie tie-ins, it inevitably feels rushed. Rise of the Manhunters becomes repetitive very quickly, with each level featuring slightly more enhanced Manhunters, but as the novelty of this wears off, the game feels like it needs more variety of opposition, and more than just the tedious puzzle elements, and the sparsely scattered flying mini games.
Overall, Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters, despite its overly wordy Terminator 3-esque title, is a decent, if not relatively average Xbox 360 game. It’s not perfect by a long shot, and it has many flaws, but it’s very playable and an excellent visual experience. It just feels like a game that, with a small amount of tweaking and few extra months in development, could have been a game worth getting excited about, rather than a perfectly acceptable, but fairly run of the mill movie tie-in, and very much the sort of game you would probably rent, but not actually buy.