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IGN Review of Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
There are times when I wish I could just let loose on a game with a string of expletives that would make a drunken longshoreman blush. God knows The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor made me do it while playing the game. But no, I'll try to actually drop my blood pressure long enough to spit out a review, one that considers the whole experience -- both good and bad.
To be sure, the latter far, far outweighs the former. Mainly because a little over halfway through, a boss battle was so pointlessly difficult that I thought it was actually the final encounter. It wasn't, but after enduring multiple marathon sessions of the three-phase fight and suffering from one too many cheap deaths, I was gone.
It's an issue that echoes throughout the game. Even the introductory tutorial level offers a jumping puzzle that basically required trial-and-error memorization to get through. That was in between stretches of mind-numbingly dumb combat that, by the time I'd hid the midway point of the game, was rendered completely useless.
This is because Tomb of the Dragon Emperor lacks any sort of independent camera control; you shoot or fight where the camera is pointing, and that camera is guided by actually moving around. You can imagine how much "fun" it is trying to get the game's loose auto-lock system to work when there are multiple enemies at different heights in front of your little brawling dude, be it original Mummy star Rick or his all-grown-up son Alex. These issues are exacerbated to ridiculousness when it comes time to fight that boss.
A good deal of the wearing effect the game has comes from repetition. It's everywhere, from the little bits of dialogue (though surprisingly the lead characters all come from the actual movie cast -- minus Jet Li and the smoking hot Isabella Leong) recycled ad nauseam, to the bland, lifeless combat moves, to the clambering sections of the game that unashamedly rip off Prince or Persia; or perhaps, more accurately, the newer Tomb Raider games.
TotDE wants so very badly to be one of those Tomb Raider games, you can just see it -- hell, there's actually a part of the game where you run around in snowy caves shooting at wolves with twin pistols. The platforming bits are borrowed right from Lara's latest outings and the gunplay... well, the less said about that, the better. It sucks. The result is a game that borrows liberally from the leaders in the genre, yet forgets to actually keep the fun, creating an infuriating experience rife with cheap falling deaths, see-sawing difficulty and stretches of yawn-inducing combat.
It's not even all that polished. On the Wii, the game actually runs at a smooth 60 frames per second, though it looks otherwise identical to the PS2 game. The PS2 version, though, suffers from frame drops, weird AI that will leave characters running in place and -- at one point -- actually glitched out so badly that I got stuck, unable to progress as my targets and accompanying music disappeared (yet characters were still imploring me to shoot at the very things that had disappeared). My only recourse was to completely quit out back to the main menu and play the level over again. Lame? Oh yes, you bet.
The one redeeming part of the game comes in how it handles some of the environmental puzzles. They're dead simple, mind you, but at least they employ ample use of the analog sticks on the PS2 and the motion-sensing controls on the Wii. They're just gestures, mind you, flicking or pulling up/down or rotating cranks, but they're at least good at breaking up the otherwise mundane shooting and clambering bits.
The core engine itself is fairly solid, which is why it's such a shame to see Eurocom completely unable to pull the trigger on most of the other parts. Though "only" a Wii/PS2 game, the textures are fine and the animations, recycled endlessly, at least look decent. There are way too many instances of an incoming attack resetting an animation (and even locking it into an endless loop, which makes my blood boil), but if nothing else those characters are both expressive and actually look like the actors while they're hitching their way through another boring fight.
It's clear the game wasn't allowed enough time to reach its full potential, though it's entirely possible that Eurocom may not have had the resources to fully exploit the license. When stuff like "...Yeti's return..." is used to indicate plural abominable snowmen, you know quality control didn't make enough passes.
©2008-07-30, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
To be sure, the latter far, far outweighs the former. Mainly because a little over halfway through, a boss battle was so pointlessly difficult that I thought it was actually the final encounter. It wasn't, but after enduring multiple marathon sessions of the three-phase fight and suffering from one too many cheap deaths, I was gone.
It's an issue that echoes throughout the game. Even the introductory tutorial level offers a jumping puzzle that basically required trial-and-error memorization to get through. That was in between stretches of mind-numbingly dumb combat that, by the time I'd hid the midway point of the game, was rendered completely useless.
This is because Tomb of the Dragon Emperor lacks any sort of independent camera control; you shoot or fight where the camera is pointing, and that camera is guided by actually moving around. You can imagine how much "fun" it is trying to get the game's loose auto-lock system to work when there are multiple enemies at different heights in front of your little brawling dude, be it original Mummy star Rick or his all-grown-up son Alex. These issues are exacerbated to ridiculousness when it comes time to fight that boss.
A good deal of the wearing effect the game has comes from repetition. It's everywhere, from the little bits of dialogue (though surprisingly the lead characters all come from the actual movie cast -- minus Jet Li and the smoking hot Isabella Leong) recycled ad nauseam, to the bland, lifeless combat moves, to the clambering sections of the game that unashamedly rip off Prince or Persia; or perhaps, more accurately, the newer Tomb Raider games.
TotDE wants so very badly to be one of those Tomb Raider games, you can just see it -- hell, there's actually a part of the game where you run around in snowy caves shooting at wolves with twin pistols. The platforming bits are borrowed right from Lara's latest outings and the gunplay... well, the less said about that, the better. It sucks. The result is a game that borrows liberally from the leaders in the genre, yet forgets to actually keep the fun, creating an infuriating experience rife with cheap falling deaths, see-sawing difficulty and stretches of yawn-inducing combat.
It's not even all that polished. On the Wii, the game actually runs at a smooth 60 frames per second, though it looks otherwise identical to the PS2 game. The PS2 version, though, suffers from frame drops, weird AI that will leave characters running in place and -- at one point -- actually glitched out so badly that I got stuck, unable to progress as my targets and accompanying music disappeared (yet characters were still imploring me to shoot at the very things that had disappeared). My only recourse was to completely quit out back to the main menu and play the level over again. Lame? Oh yes, you bet.
The one redeeming part of the game comes in how it handles some of the environmental puzzles. They're dead simple, mind you, but at least they employ ample use of the analog sticks on the PS2 and the motion-sensing controls on the Wii. They're just gestures, mind you, flicking or pulling up/down or rotating cranks, but they're at least good at breaking up the otherwise mundane shooting and clambering bits.
The core engine itself is fairly solid, which is why it's such a shame to see Eurocom completely unable to pull the trigger on most of the other parts. Though "only" a Wii/PS2 game, the textures are fine and the animations, recycled endlessly, at least look decent. There are way too many instances of an incoming attack resetting an animation (and even locking it into an endless loop, which makes my blood boil), but if nothing else those characters are both expressive and actually look like the actors while they're hitching their way through another boring fight.
It's clear the game wasn't allowed enough time to reach its full potential, though it's entirely possible that Eurocom may not have had the resources to fully exploit the license. When stuff like "...Yeti's return..." is used to indicate plural abominable snowmen, you know quality control didn't make enough passes.
©2008-07-30, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved