I admit it; if the story mode’s longer than four hours, I might actually pick this game up. Because it looks absolutely ridiculous.
This trailer has the typical self-seriousness that’s marked the franchise. But the effect, thanks to it being mostly cinematics, comes off less like a video game trailer and more like a cheesy B-movie, right down to paying a respected actor a fortune to deliver lines like:
“Ideas don’t determine who’s right. Power does. I have the power. So I’m right.”
God bless you, Kevin Spacey. I hope the house this game bought you is worth every penny. Anyway, the plot is largely nonsense: Terrorists hit five nuclear reactors on five continents, and Atlas, our evil corporation, swoops in and fixes everything with their private military and, apparently, bottomless engineering budget. Gee, I wonder if it was really terrorists that blew up those reactors?
The appeal of this trailer is really the little clips that show us how ridiculous everything about this game is. Here’s our hero doing his best Spider-Man impersonation!
And, of course, because this is the future… there are jetpacks:
Honestly, the future setting, and the fact that you’re not trying to solve real, complex geopolitical problems by making all the brown people/Russians fall down but instead blowing the hell out of a cartoonishly evil fake company, really helps mitigate some of the creepier aspects of the franchise. It’s like a slightly more grounded cyberpunk game. Hopefully, though, Sledgehammer gets to introduce some actual design elements to this one; it would be a shame if they gave us webshooters and jetpacks only to lock us into corridors.