As far as hard-boiled, TV action drama goes, Fox's 24 rules the roost. The show is wildly popular and with good reason. So it's with no measure of surprise that someone would put together a video game version of such a popular and action-oriented show.
2K Games and Sony Europe's 24: The Game plops itself right in between the second and third seasons of the show, and goes straight for the jittery, fast-paced style of the TV series -- and pretty much nails it. Unfortunately, all that time spent emulating the show's style clearly needed to be reined in a bit for the sake of making the gameplay something other than the clunky bore that it is. Like the show's action, 24's gameplay tries to throw in everything but the kitchen sink, but in this case, it couldn't make any one of these attempts work well enough to be fun.
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The storyline of 24: The Game is just about as good as you could possibly hope for from a game version of the show. It features practically all of the principal characters from the show, including Kiefer Sutherland's Jack Bauer, the constantly freaked out CTU agent whose misadventures make up the bulk of the show's airtime. In this particular adventure, we initially join Bauer and crew as they're about to run up on a boat that reportedly has a huge weapons cache and a lot of the chemical weapon ricin, and which is parked in an LA harbour. Of course, that's only where the story begins. Kidnappings, terrorist attacks, assassination attempts -- these are just everyday occurrences for the CTU agency, and every single one happens over the course of the game's single-day timeline.
Before you even ask, no, 24: The Game is not 24 hours long in terms of gameplay time. It's closer to seven or eight hours to complete the missions. The shorter length isn't a detriment to the flow of the story, however, since the game simply tends to jump around a bit more and at a little faster of a pace. It doesn't feel like things are cut out as much as things just move more briskly (though the occasional illogical location jump does occur from time to time). And that's really the strongest thing 24 has going for it. This game never feels like it slows down, even when it goes into stealth mode. The story just keeps moving at breakneck speed, never stopping to explain itself more than it has to. Sometimes, it can be a bit overwhelming. For the record, if you're not a huge 24 fan, there will be characters and situations that never quite fit into the equation without prior knowledge of their roles.
The fundamental flaw in 24's gameplay design is that it tries to cover too broad a spectrum of styles and mechanics without ever stopping to make sure that anything in that spectrum is satisfying on its own merits. The most time you'll spend doing any one thing in 24 is with the third-person shooting. You control Jack and a few other key heroes of the story throughout 24's adventure, though all of the characters handle precisely the same (with the exception of Jack's daughter, Kim, who must remain stealthy pretty much at all times due to a lack of weapons training). For the most part, 24 is very much a run-and-gun type of game. Terrorists, mercenaries, and other assorted bad guys will come running in or be patrolling various sectors of random enemy bases, crack houses, and so on. Sometimes you'll have non-player character associates shooting alongside you, but mostly it's a one-man (or woman) show.
Not that you'll have much problem dealing with the bad guys alone. The artificial intelligence for the enemies in 24 is what you might call a bit dim. Sometimes they're smart enough to take proper cover, and occasionally enemies will run off when they spot you to sound an alarm, but mostly they'll stand in one spot or walk right toward you, periodically firing their weapons wildly with only a mild hope of ever hitting you.
There are some cover-fire mechanics, as well as a decent variety of weapons, but again, none of these features matter. Cover fire is only useful during stealth missions (and even then, only in rare situations), and you mostly never have to think about what weapon is in your hand. The game automatically switches you to the best weapon for the task and is usually pretty good about it.
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While this might make the third-person shooting sequences sound like the easiest thing in the world, they're not. As long as you can pick off enemies from a relative distance, you're in fine shape and will rarely take much damage. But the second you get in close, you're hosed, thanks to the spastic camera. If you're in a tight space when fighting an enemy, or if there's other downed enemies in the close vicinity, nothing works right.
And that happens to be the best aspect of the gameplay. There are several other disparate parts that make up the design, which are all universally bad. Driving missions, for instance, are perpetually awful. The cars handle like a donkey on an ice rink, skittering and sliding about all over the place.
24 throws a lot of crazy minigames at you, with at least one of which being pretty good and the rest being worthless. The single good one is the interrogation game. At times, Jack will have to use his powers of persuasion on a particularly uncooperative suspect to find out some dire piece of information. The rest of the minigames, unfortunately, fare nowhere near as well. Most of these are idiot-simple puzzles that require little more than second grade logic skills. There are some decent sniper missions, a few marginal stealth missions, and more minigames, which are basically variations on the ones we've already listed. All of the variety does inevitably help make 24 a little more interesting than if it were just committed to doing one or two of these things, simply because you never quite know what you'll be doing next. The problem is that nothing is ever very fun for very long.
At times, 24's presentation can be equally inconsistent. The game does an amazing job with its cutscenes, presenting them with the same wobbly, handheld camera work that is found in the show, as well as constant camera splits to show off different things happening at once. The split-screen stuff even comes into play during the game itself, though usually just to let you know that there are bad guys floating around somewhere nearby. The in-game visuals mostly look OK, though there are some severe animation glitches that ugly things up something fierce. Also, the frame rate tends to tank pretty heavily, especially during the driving sequences.
The audio fares significantly better, thanks in no small part to the voice acting of the show's cast. Surprisingly, Sutherland is the most inconsistent of the bunch. There are times where he seems to capture the character's ferocity, but there are other times when he sounds too subdued. Dennis Haysbert is also barely in the game at all, but the rest of the cast, including Elisha Cuthbert, Reiko Aylesworth, James Badge Dale, Carlos Bernard, Andreas Katsulas, and Tom Sizemore, is used to great effect. The soundtrack does a good job of keeping pace with the action, adding the right mix of drama to the action scenes.
24: The Game can't be dismissed as just another lazy, licensed action game, because laziness is in no way apparent here. If anything, it feels like the developers overextended themselves beyond what they could capably do, and the game suffers for it.
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