Men in Black II: Alien Escape

by Fennec Fox
July 03, 2002 00:00 AM PST

Will Smith probably wouldn't be cracking wise so much if fighting off aliens was this difficult. Infogrames demonstrates the perils of interstellar defense.

There's no denying the fact that games based on movies are giant leaps better than they used to be. Gone are the days of bad NES platformers like Total Recall and beyond-forgettable arcade titles like Street Fighter: The Movie; Spider-Man has demonstrated once and for all that actually making the game fun to play does, in fact, have a positive effect on sales. Infogrames and Melbourne House have obviously realized this, and Men in Black II is a visually exceptional action game that fully and completely retains the flavor of the summer movie. Too bad nobody thought to tell the people responsible for the gameplay about this.

The game is comprised of five missions, each with a handful of checkpoints you're allowed to continue from after dying three times. Playing as either Agent Jay or Agent Kay (they each use slightly different weapons), you must pick your way through the missions, blowing away aliens with your cool G.I. Joe laser rifles and grabbing the power-ups they drop to refill your energy and enhance your firepower. Your three weapons can be powered up five times, usually progressing from a single wussy blast to three- and four-way fire and culminating in a shockwave blast that could drop a Martian howler elephant. Each mission has a big boss at the end, of course, that you'll have to defeat after engaging in a little Men in Black style repartee (simulated example: "So, you mindin' anything else?" "Would you believe...toasters?" "No, you mind if I kick yo' ass?").

The one thing Melbourne House got spot-on here is the atmosphere. The graphics are well-crafted, if a little sparse on the detail, and the game runs at a lovely 60fps in all but the most hectic of situations. The soundtrack is best described as "eclectic"�it alternates between offbeat jazz and goofy techno, a combination that fits the theme of the movie perfectly. Even the cutscenes are consistently amusing, and they appear to be done in realtime to boot (although any relation to Will Smith's voice and the voice of the guy that's playing him in-game is purely coincidental).

Oh, but this is the game we're talking about here, right? It's easy to forget with titles like this sometimes. Men in Black II is, to put it bluntly, one of the most frustrating games in the entire PlayStation 2 library, thanks to a few design flaws that could've been easily avoided.

Each level Agent Jay or Kay runs through is essentially divided into sets of "battle zones". Whenever you enter a new zone, the game teleports in a horde of hostile aliens, almost always completely surrounding you in the process. You're physically disallowed from proceeding until you liquefy all the aliens, so forget about pulling any of that Solid Snake ninja-stealth junk here. Now, this would be a fine and dandy game formula but for two problems: the collision detection is bad, and your weapon is powered down every time you get hit. Sure, you can just grab the power-up again (it sort of magically pops out of your body after you're shot), but when surrounded by aliens with state-of-the-art death rays in their hands, there's just no time to think about any of that. Real power-ups also disappear stupidly fast, usually blinking out of existence before you can even reach them. Arrrrrgh.

The worst part is the sheer unfairness of the game's save system. Each mission takes a good half hour or so to complete, and that's if you make it through in one go, which never happens. If you can make it to a checkpoint before Game Over, you're allowed to continue from that point, but only with the exact amount of lives and energy you had before. In other words, if you scrabble your way to a checkpoint with zero lives and 10 percent energy then die immediately afterwards, you can continue as much as you want...with zero lives and 10 percent energy. Arrrrrgh! And you can save your progress only after finishing an entire mission, something quite simply beyond the abilities of most gamers.

Men in Black II features all the ingredients needed for a fine movie-license game�the lovely graphics, the movie-style atmosphere, the capable cutscenes�but the game's inaccessibility makes it very hard to enjoy. It's almost as if the designers meant for gamers to play with cheats on from the get-go (cheats which they thoughtfully didn't provide in time for this review). Indeed, if there's an invincibility code for this game, then it could potentially be an enjoyable one-time rental from the video store. Paying full-price for this game, though, will likely make you feel like a buffoon after a few days.