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Captain America: Super Solider

Time In

Playstation 3 single player $99.95

First published on 20 Jul 2011. Updated on 6 Feb 2012.

The day will come, perhaps, when I will play a movie tie-in game and not find myself cursing at the mapping glitches, at the cookie-cutter enemies and the linear levels. Maybe I shall one day load up a disc and marvel at the impressive combo battle moves, be intrigued by the depth of story and the zippy dialogue, and I will enjoy levelling up through grabbing collectables that are integral to the story rather than scavenger hunts meant to encourage replay that will never come. Maybe there will be a game to redefine what a movie tie-in can be.

Despite the world's most misleading trailer, this sure as hell isn’t it.

Captain America is hoping to be a big ol’ action blockbuster, so I had suitably lowered expectations for the game. Sure, the script would have only been finished a year ago at most, and would have been kept under wraps until the last minute, meaning that any studio would be up against it from day one to hit a street date determined by the film studio rather than whether, say, the game was actually ready. Sega worked around this by giving the game an original script, apparently, but the story appears to have been titled “Captain America, Identical Enemy Killer’.

It’s set in WWII with Cap being the Allies’ effort in what appears to have been a Europe-wide Super Solider effort, with Cap dropped into a Bavarian castle in which Hydra are housing their diabolical science. That's the cue for Mr America to move through this single location destroying things, fighting Germans who all speak in German-accented English and sneer about how weak America (the country) is, before a quicktime-heavy bossfight ends one section and launches into the next remarkably similar one.

(And while we're on the subject of Hydra: since these are Germans fighting Americans in WWII, specifically ones that are involved in bizarre medical experiments, what's with the squeamishness about calling them Nazis? Are Sega worried about alienating the all-important Nazi-gamer demographic? Did they feel that Call of Duty had missed a trick?)

That art is surprisingly crap too, although the clue is in the opening title option to switch to 3-D: maybe it’s optimised for the six people with the necessary technology to experience it in all its extra-D glory. And even if there appears to be something interesting in the distance, the levels herd you into the necessary direction. Cap might be a super soldier of incredible power, but apparently he can’t climb over a pile of rubble unless it’s narratively necessary.

The game is also incredibly short: you should be able to plough through it in six hours maximum, and despite the aforementioned collectables (left, in the main, out on tables or in the middle of the street – you know, where most criminal masterminds leave their secret dossiers and enemy schematics), you won’t be coming back.

Then again, Captain America is probably the most one-dimensional super hero of all, so it seems strangely fitting that his game follows suit. If this is designed to whet one’s appetite for the film, then it might be best not to expect a big-screen banquet.

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By Andrew P Street