Publisher: THQ
Developer: THQ
# of Players: 1
Category: Action
Release Dates
N Amer - 09/27/2006
- Also available on:
- NDS
Alex Rider: Stormbreaker Review
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Our boy Alex is a 14 year old boy who lives in
England with his uncle. Unbeknownst to him, Alex's uncle is a spy for MI6 and
has recently been killed while on assignment. Since his uncle spent much of
Alex's youth taking him scuba diving, mountain climbing and other such
adventurous past times. All in preparation of Alex eventually becoming an MI6
agent himself. However, even at 14, the agency believes they can use Alex in
order to bring the man that killed Alex's uncle to justice, by sending him in
undercover to stop millions of kids from being killed by a madman.
Alright, this is actually a movie that's going
around England right now. I don't know if it will make it stateside for a
theatrical release, but it should be available on DVD in about three months.
Anyway, if the plot sounds familiar, then you are right, the Cody Banks
movies, the Spy kids movies, all of them involve children becoming spies in
order to save either the world or their parents or both. None of which were
translated into a decent game, unfortunately Stormbreaker seems to follow the
path already established.
Stormbreaker has you playing out various stages of
the movie, completing military training, exploring the villain's mansion,
racing through underground mines and battling evil henchmen. It's viewed
from a top/side perspective depending on the level. As young Alex, you are
given spy items that are trying to be in the 007 vein, a grappling hook yo-yo,
a pen that discharges poisonous gas, and other, semi-original gear. It
is fairly easy to move around the game and using items wasn't difficult
either. What was difficult was the sometimes eye-watering graphics that
unfortunately do hamper gameplay. Alex is a blond boy who in some levels
easily melds into the background, as do other items/bad guys. The colors to
me, appeared all wrong and only when certain interior levels came on screen
did things start looking correctly to me. And by that I mean, my eyes didn't
water anymore, the lines on objects, houses and even characters are lacking
that smoothness that we take for granted in the average game.
Now in all fairness, the game does try and mix
things up by not having the same thing occur over and over. Some levels have
you running around, some have you swimming in the water and there is even one
with a horse where you have to pick up carrots to keep its strength up. Not
entirely expected by me for a GBA game, but where the levels are varying in
what you do, they do get tiresome very quickly and my patience with them was
waning almost from the get go, the gameplay in itself was a frustrating,
unwieldy experience. And to top it all off the game does fall for the same
get key, open door kind of play that negates any sort of glimmer of hope the
game may have contained after reading the back of the box.
I handed the game to my son who is six, and asked
him to try it for a little while, he popped the game in and played for about
ten minutes, he then stopped telling me that he didn't understand what to do.
Now the game box does say that it's for ages 10 and up, but I think that comes
from the reading and comprehension that the game features. Regardless, when I
sat down with him and explained things and showed him what he was supposed to
do, he did say that the exploring part of the game (you can check all sorts of
places for various items) was pretty good but didn't much care for the
fighting (hmmm, go figure).
| Review Scoring Details for Alex Stormbreaker GBA |
Gameplay: 4.6
It's not terribly difficult, but doesn't have the
timing of a much more developed game, I felt the responses were a little off,
especially when using some of the spy gear.
Graphics: 3.0
It is one of the worst GBA games I have seen
in quite a while.
Sound: 3.0
Sound, there was sound?
Difficulty: Medium
It's so tough to see things that it makes the game
unintentionally difficult.
Concept: 3.5
At least they took the time to make a level where
you ride an ATV.
Overall: 3.6
Wow, this game was not what I thought it would be.
The original license wasn't an interesting or original idea and the game sadly
follows suit.
