Prison Break: The Conspiracy

I purchased this one for another hypothetically easy completion. I had never watched the Prison Break series despite many recommendations and I was afraid the game could ruin the storyline of the series. However, as it states on the back on the box, you play as Tom Paxton, who has a job to ‘interact with and influence the story of season one.’ This put my mind at ease because any interaction with the storyline would have to be nullified as Tom does not play any role in the series.

The storyline is what you would expect from such a game in that it isn’t really under its own control as it tries to fit around an already established cast and plot while still trying to make sense. It does achieve this but it does feel quite forced and although I haven’t seen the first season yet, I’m sure there will be parts of it that don’t make sense.

In terms of the standalone story though, it isn’t too bad and that’s mainly because of the main protagonist, Mr Paxton. In a world of characters doing unbelievable things for their stature and age, Tom Paxton is a thirty-something secret agent hard man who is the perfect protagonist for completing an espionage mission into a prison full of dangerous criminals. His voice is also the right balance of intimidating and aggressive, even when he is not trying to be intimidating. Or aggressive.

The game’s environments are visually underwhelming, but the character facial expressions are actually pretty good. Mind you, Tom’s facial expressions are actually really easy when all he has to do is look intimidating or aggressive.

The gameplay elements are stealth missions interspersed with some fist fights. It never gets any more advanced than that and the only way of doing stealth is to avoid being seen or heard. You can’t lure guards or take them out silently to make your way through areas so it is fairly one dimensional.

That said, I did sort of lure at one point by allowing myself to be seen so that a guard would investigate whether he actually saw something. I don’t think this the intended way to do it though and was more down to my risky cunning than gameplay mechanics.

A few story elements were really lazy as well. At one point, Tom makes a phone call to his boss when he is stuck and his boss tells him he needs to talk to a specific inmate. After the call, the specific character is sitting on the bench right behind Tom. Similar things like this happen throughout the game.

The fighting mechanics are also underwhelming.  You have three things you can do: quick attack, heavy attack and block. You can also use the block button to do a counter and once you figure out the timings, it makes fist fights a procession as opposed to a challenge, especially when one counter move knocks your opponent down allowing you to kick them. Do this twice and the fight is over.

There are a couple of things about the fighting don’t make sense either. When you knock a guy down, you can kick him but he can’t do the same to you. Normally I complain about the AI being able to do things that player characters can’t, however this one felt really unfair. The second thing is that in order to end a fight you have to do a finishing move, triggered by a quick time event. The amount of times I missed this and then had to beat the guy up again was ridiculous. If I knock someone down and kick them over and over again I wouldn’t expect them to keep getting back up.

That brings me on nicely to the issue of quick-time events. I’m not that critical of quick-time events as I believe they have their place and that place is certainly not in Prison Break. You will face quick-time events throughout the stealth sections and they often involve having to rapidly press one button then press another immediately after. There is a small noise that triggers the change and then less than a second before you have to press the next button. Failing a quick time event is game over. As you can imagine, this lovely little feature led to a lot of game overs for me until I had failed enough times to know exactly when to stop tapping one button and pressing the second. As I’ve said in previous reviews, I am not a fan of ‘trial and error’ gaming.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

Firstly, as always, 30 of the achievements are obtainable for simply playing through the story. There are three additional ones you can earn by playing the game on hard (Shark) mode; one for winning one hundred fights; one for winning a fight without taking any damage and another for completing the game on hard.

In addition to the hard (Jaws) achievements, there are six grinding achievements. The Mogul achievement for collecting $5,000 dollars can only be done by completing fights in the underground fighting arena. This is coupled with your winning one hundred fights above, getting six tattoos (which is the only thing you can actually spend your money on), spending ten minutes on the two items of gym equipment (which made me realise how long ten minutes is), winning fifty fights and performing fifty reversal moves (counters) in fights.

The biggest challenge of the above is getting over how tedious it is to do it all, especially in a story-driven game environment. We are put in the prison to observe the main characters from the first season, not to make loads of money by competing in underground fights. It’s meant to be a covert operation but I’m pretty sure if you go in and beat up everyone going and get $5,000 for your trouble, you are probably going to attract quite a lot of attention. In addition, part of the story has you bribe a guard to get a specific room, however for some bizarre reason, you cannot use the £5,000 gained earlier and instead have to... compete in another underground fight to get the money??

Lastly, there is one missable achievement for playing through the whole game without getting spotted –so no continues basically. I was actually excited about the prospect of only having to do one playthrough of the game as hard (Bruno) mode was available from the start. However, I didn’t want to play through the game using a guide and it became very tedious resetting the Xbox every time I came across a new area and got caught straight away, so I sucked it up and played through the game a second time on easy to smash this last one out and take the 1,000 points.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Prison Break is a very ‘meh’ game. Playable but it didn’t take my breath away. A stealth game with only one way to play has absolutely no replay value either so I won’t be playing it again. Overall, the experience is underwhelming and disappointing.