Game #1058: G.I. Joe - Operation Blackout

  Bad licensed games are eternal, and knowing that is half the battle.

 Back when I was a wee 90's lad my only brush with the popular G. I. Joe franchise was through the toys and the NES Konami(?) game, since I'm pretty sure the series never made it over here. Or maybe it did? Regardless, I've not love for the franchise, but somehow I managed to hype myself with G. I. Joe: Operation Blackout, I think somehow it looked pretty decent. But beauty is often times skin deep....

 Well, first of all, on Switch, at least on handheld mode, the game looks blurry as hell, and there's absolutely no excuse when the game doesn't seem like nothing out of the ordinary. It's very colorful, and the cell-shaded look is pretty neat, but there's no good reason as to why it should look so blurry on Switch. As to cut costs, cutscenes, while fully voice-acted, used comic-book styled stills... but the art is pretty, most of the time, so I didn't really care. In other words, the art direction is great, but the technical aspect leaves a lot to be desired. Since I'm dabbling on the technical, loading times are way too long. It's so bad I actually wrote it twice on my notes.

 The game plays like your standard third-person shooter, but it has a few decent ideas. You get 12 different characters, 6 G.I. Joes and 6 cobras, each character has at least one alternate costume and 4 skins for their main weapon. Snake Eyes seemed to be the only character with a single alternate costume, but it looks so blurry I couldn't really tell how he was supposed to look, but it seemed to be the game's only joke costume. Each character has two weapons, a main gun and a side gun, a near-useless melee attack, a dodge, a unique, and often-times hard to land due to the startup, ultimate move and the ability to throw grenades. I'll give it this, they managed to make characters to feel different, not only does every character have a ultimate move unique to them, but sometimes their dodges are different, most characters can dodge, but, for example, Snake Eyes and StormShadow can dash three times, a Cobra deploys a shield and another Cobra charges forward! Main weapons are very different too, to further differentiate each character, which was very welcome.

 The game offers two ways to play it: A Story Campaign that can be played in offline co-op, and it's where you'll be able to unlock character and weapon skins by finding hidden collectibles or completing side-objectives, as well as a multi-player component, playable off-line with another player, and can't be played against bots, that allows for death matches, king of the hill, team arena or capture the flag competitions. I'll give it this, it's cool to finally have a third-person shooter on the Switch, if only it was any good.

 I've a small suspicion that the multiplayer mode might be quite decent, however, the only mode I played was the campaign in Single Player, and it was rough. The game feels absolutely lifeless, with unrewarding, boring shootouts against robots that sometimes employs endless enemy waves. IT feels as if the AI is only shooting at you, and not at your AI companion, which made the campaign surprisingly challenging. Every missions has a pre-selected duo of characters you can play as, which was a bit disappointing. Another thing I noticed was that quite a few missions recycle maps, even if the objectives were different... well somewhat different, as objectives are different flavors of 'Defeat every enemy', 'Survive' and 'Press the switch to proceed'.

 If you're not planning on playing the Multiplayer Mode, G. I. Joe: Operation Blackout simply isn't worth it. The campaign was such a drag! That said, in its defense, I think the multiplayer component is probably a bit more fun considering you can use any character and characters actually have differences to them. Not that it would fix how unrewarding the core mechanics are, but hey... at least it's a third-person shooter on Switch, right?

 4.0