kozaru

Available now on XBOX Live is the demo for The Bourne Conspiracy. A little over a gig in size, for me it was worth the wait.

The game will follow the movies, mostly, and the demo has some of the best sequences from the first movie in it.

You start off in the US Embassy, where you, as Jason Bourne, have just been identified as a Very Bad Man and take out two secret service and one marine guard in the foyer. There is a theatrical intro to the game part, which roughly follows the movie sequence as well.

There are a few modes of gameplay, basic walking around, hand-to-hand combat, shooting and driving. The hand-to-hand and shooting just happen when appropriate, and usually seamlessly with what is happening “theatrically” on the screen. It’s kind of a twitch game, but not in the Counter Strike sense. I’ll get into that later when it’s appropriate.

So you can block, light attack and heavy attack as you fight away. Combinations of light/heavy will perform specific combos of attacks. Every hit you get in increases your adrenaline meter. Once this gets to a certain level, you can perform a takedown. This is usually different each time depending on the character being fought, where the character is being fought, proximity to walls, tables, etc. In the true Jason Bourne style, if there’s a wall nearby, you can bet it will be used to bounce a head off.

Then there’s the running. Sprinting, mostly. And the hook… Bourne Instinct. This will show on your minimap where things are, where badguys are etc.

So as we move from the foyers, up the stairs and meet the poor secret service guy that gets notted and his radio stolen, we sprint again towards the steel mesh wall that block the corridors dropping down and hit first twitch element.
“Push (Random Button) To Not Die”
As you sprint toward the closing wall, an image of a controller button pops up and you have around half a second to hit it in order to slide under. If not, you’re caught, boo hoo.
There are various expansions on these points, you can sprint and do a takedown with a twitch button on an unsuspecting target, you can counter boss character’s own takedown with a twitch, if there are two badguys you’ll get a twitch moment where Jason will kick the one behind while still guarding off the one in front.
When the shooting comes into play, takedowns may involve holding the guy beating you in the path of another’s bullets. It all becomes familiar very quickly, and yes, blocking is important.
Then there’s “Seamless Combat”, where you go from shooting to fighting if a bad guy steps from behind a box in front of you, for example. You deal with him, go back to shooting.
Another nifty feature, is that the faces of Jason and bad guys will get cut and bruise as a beating goes on.

As Jason Bourne moves through the story in the movies, they touch on previous missions as flashbacks. The game lets you play out those flashbacks as a whole. The demo contains a part of one of those “past life” missions, which gives you a bit more freedom with the lives of badguys.

The third part of the demo is driving the streets of Paris. Very simple controls, forward, back, steer and handbrake. Again, twitch elements come into play to miss accidents, or follow a cinematic of reverse/handbrake/spin/go kind of thing.

The graphics are nice and big, camera controls are good. A dodge function when fighting would be nice.

Even tho it’s just a demo, it was quite polished and probably very indicative of the finished product. there’s a lot of ways they could have made it suck, but it doesn’t, so that’s good.
Here’s video of the gameplay to finish up.