| Conspiracy Weapons Of Mass Destruction Game |
Conspiracy: Weapons of Mass Destruction is not that type
of game.
To be totally honest, it's an insult to even mention
these games on the same page. Because rather than quietly wooing you with its
class and whispering sweet nothings in your ear, this first-person shooter
stomps up behind you, drops its trousers and starts pissing against your leg,
and then wonders why you're looking at it with such total abject disgust.
Sneaky? That's
what secret agents do...
Not so Sly Spy: Secret Agent
You probably want to know where it all went wrong. Okay,
maybe not, given Kuju's game was largely under the radar in the first place.
But there has been a glimmer of interest, given the ties to its competent if
uninspired stablemate, Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior [poster tag line:
"Better than Halo!" How we laughed - Ed]. However, unlike that title,
Conspiracy lacks a franchise tie-in to draw in the rubes. Instead, we get a
stock 'retired secret agent' story that, to be frank, is so tired you'll be
fighting the narcolepsy before the game even starts.
Assuming control of the woefully named Cole
Justice (described as "an ex-government secret service agent, trained
mercenary and all-round tough guy"... can you feel the edginess?), you
have to take the square-jawed hero on one last assignment. This assignment?
Why, to take down a rogue government agency, of course. Apparently, under the
equally derivative moniker of Hydra, this agency has been developing weapons of
mass destruction to sell for their evil means, money and gloating criminal
mwhahahas. Cole, with his Intel handler, Cara, who communicates from a nice
safe distance (coward), has to infiltrate Hydra's lair and put a stop to their
plans. By shooting them all. To death.
There's no irony here. No cheeky wink that lets us know
we've stumbled into the realm of hackney. This is stone cold serious. We should
have taken heed from the title, which alone shows the sheer lack of imagination
on display. It was like Kuju picked out two of the more popular and overused buzzwords/phrases of the
last decade and stuck them together, evoking The Power of Cliché in their
combination.
Uses real moving graphics!
If the giant flashing danger
signs weren’t going off at that point, you know things aren’t promising when
the game's press release proudly boasts a "full arsenal of weapons
including pistols, grenade launchers, sniper rifles and rocket launchers"
and "realistic shot wounds and human damage!" Guys, you dorealise it's 2005, right? These things are the
very least we expect from an FPS now. Even shooters on the GBA have these kind
of features as basic requirements. Putting them as examples of why we should
buy your game is a bit like a contemporary driving title bragging that it has
wheels. Things kick off with title music that tries
to come across suspenseful and subtle, but sounds like the soundtrack to a porn
flick parody; almost an oxymoron in itself. Maybe it's intentional in its
gloomy minimalism, but as soon as the opening level starts things get worse.
The horrendously blurred, featureless texturing doesn't even try to transport
you into a world of global espionage, and neither do the almost stop-frame
movements of the guards who fight you. Watch them closely enough and you can
actually see where their animation frames loop and
restart. That's before you shoot them and they fall over and die in the same
manner each time. Occasionally you'll get a 'clutching rear
end' animation, and if you're really lucky there's an 'instant bloody chunks
explosion' one. Variety, see.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the level design for this
opening stage wasn’t so rough. But even disregarding the fact that by stepping
backwards from your start point you can die instantly, there’s very little
incentive to continue playing. It starts off like a shoddy version of Turok:
Dinosaur Hunter, then after a short while into the second level, a slow
realisation dawns. It's not only content with being a half-hearted Turok. It's
also a poor man's Rogue Agent. Lord help us.
Conspiracy against good gameplay
For the sake of the review, we persisted. To
the bitter end. Only to find Conspiracy got more laughable the further it progressed. The
levels remain mercifully short, linear and consist of generally moving from
room to room, corridor to corridor, flicking switches, shooting guards,
collecting items, blowing up targets and downloading information. All of this
is fine in principle, but there's a total lack of interesting pacing or layout,
obviously not helped by visually listless presentation - a particular source of
frustration when trying to find out what's interactive and what's not. Mostly
the answer is 'not'. Some puzzles merely ended up solved by pressing the X
button around the badly designed environment until you find something that
reacts, only to end up taking damage for your efforts because there's no
warning that things are going to start exploding, just to 'keep you on your
toes'.
The game mechanics - in keeping with the outdated
visuals, terrible soundtrack and third-rate voice acting - are similarly
archaic. If you want to change the controls, there's no option in-game. No, you
must restart the damn thing and experience freaky porno title screen music all
over again. Joy. Want to shoot out the security cameras to stop an alarm
bringing a gaggle of guards? Forget about it. You can't shoot the cams; instead
you're forced to sneak around in some laboured attempt at stealth.
