I bought the Green Lantern for another easy 1,000
points and was not disappointed for the most part, however, I am finding some people’s
opinions on what is easy to be very misleading. In my Terminator Salvation review, I talked about how gamers were
avoiding playing the game through on hard and trying to find a way of
completing the game on ‘easy’ and getting it to count as ‘hard’ by doing some
complicated shit with save files.
One such
ridiculous solution was to use a second controller as a ‘tank’ character and
play through the game with two controllers. Again, to me this is something that
seems like a lot more hassle than it is worth. You develop your character
through levelling, thus making the game easier the further you go in it.
Green Lantern was a unique experience
for me in that I couldn’t decide which was better – the film or the game. Don’t
me wrong, this is based on the film being poor but there are certain
comparisons that can be made here. Hal is still a bit of dick, but in the game,
it’s more of a sucking-Green-Lantern-Cock type of dickishness than his general
twatish attitude in the film. That said, he is more likable in the game and
actually has a bit of backbone.
The story
itself actually works quite well. It develops as the Green Lantern Corps gets
attacked by some evil robot dudes called the Manhunters – a term which is
slightly intergalactically racist as they kill more than just ‘men.’ As Hal and
company fight back against the machines, they discover that the machines are
trying to use fear energy to destroy the Green Lanterns and become the Galaxy
police once again. There are several plot twists along the way and it was kind
of nice to play a movie game where I didn’t already know the story.
Graphics and
sound were both very unimaginative and dull. The level environments were
similar to that of The Fantastic Four,
however they were a little bit better in that there is a very slight variation
in the path you can take in some levels. In most cases, the alternate paths
lead to the sparse collectible items.
The gameplay
can make or break movie based games and while this one was nearly glitch free,
the repetitive nature of the game was not very enjoyable. As you gain levels,
you can buy various constructs which give you different ways to destroy the
evil robots. What I didn’t realise was that once you unlock the Mech Suit and
the Minigun, you won’t need or want to use any of the others, and that it’s a
pretty big fail when the power-ups in a game make the rest of the game
redundant.
Achievements – 1,000 Points – 40
Achievements
The
achievements automatically win points for having the ability to play on the
hardest difficulty from the start and that they are stackable. This means two
achievements in one go from completing the game on hard.
There are ten
story related achievements, one for each mission in the game and while playing,
you will pick up by default a lot of the construct kills achievements. There
are twelve of these which are easy to get on a playthrough and can be easily
gained by replaying one mission to grind them out.
In addition
to the construct ones, there is one achievement for spinning around in a circle
ten times – which I think is playing it fast and loose with the word
‘achievement’ but that can be said of most games – and also two others for
using your powers, both of which are obtained by default from playing the game.
The main
reason that the achievements are easy is that they don’t make you go over and
above just playing the game with minimal need for grinding. There are two
achievements for collecting asteroids but there are only 14 of these for
another two achievements.
I did have
to grind out the last few upgrade achievements but it didn’t take any more than
an hour. There is also one pointless achievement for completing a level in
offline co-op. This is easily done on the second mission by plugging in a
second controller. That’s it. Then play single player.
Downloadable Content – N/A
Definitely
an easy 1,000 points. Definitely zero replay value. Slightly better than the
film, even if Hal Jordan is giving out free blow jobs to the Green Lantern
Corps. There’s not really much else to say. This is not a gamers game; it is an
achievement hunter’s game.
