Review: Watchmen: The End Is Nigh

Alan's not gonna like this...

A lot of us here at the 8th had some serious doubts about Deadline Game’s Watchmen tie-in. The trailers and screenshots leading up the game’s release seemed to point towards a pretty stupid looking experience. And for the most part… we were right. Watchmen: the End is Nigh is a pretty shameless effort to cash in on the film’s hype, and yet, it does have its moments.

The End is Nigh is a prequel of sorts to both the graphic novel as well as the film (although I wouldn’t recommend asking Alan Moore how canon it is). As the first installment in an episodic series, the game is set in the days before the Keene Act, which outlawed masked vigilantism and sent most of the costumed heroes into retirement. Here we find Rorschach and Nite owl II at the height of their crime-fighting careers, working as a team to take down gangs and quell prison riots. Both are playable characters, each with their own distinct fighting style. Nite Owl is the more technical of the two, utilizing some fancy punches and kicks as well as his suit’s array of gadgetry. Rorschach is the much more brutal of the two. Using a fast and dirty fighting style, he can rip weapons out of enemies’ hands and beat the holy hell out of them as well as enter a “rage” mode to make his attacks even more devastating.

If you’re thinking right about now that the game sounds like a really generic beat-em-up, you’re absolutely right. You have two attack buttons, a dodge button and some special attacks which you use to mow through levels filled with generic baddies. You’ll fight rioting prisoners, street thugs, commando mercenaries and more, but all have the exact same attacks. Run into an area, fight some bad guys. Repeat. Over and over and over again. You’ll basically be fighting the same set of enemies in what basically functions as the same set of areas for the entirety of the game.

End attempts to break this monotony with special finishing moves which can be activated when an enemy is low on health. Unfortunately, these finishers seldom feel especially “cool” and fail to capture much of the stylized action of the Snyder film. The fact that you only have a limited set of them will guarantee that they will get old pretty freakin’ fast.

Another problem I have with the combat is the extremely uninspired level design. Save for the last level perhaps, basically every area you fight in will function in the same way. There are hardly ever any environmental hazards or pieces of intractable scenery that could’ve made the combat in each scene feel a bit more varied. You can’t even jump most of the time, meaning you’ll have to take the long way down flights of stairs and around scenery. Very heroic.

But, like I said, Watchmen: the End is Nigh does have its moments. The split-screen co-op play is very refreshing to see and a hell of a lot more fun than going through the game by yourself. The combat system, while simple, is still very fun; it is the monotony of the scenarios that hold it back. Graphically, the game is pretty top notch for a downloadable title with the Watchmen world and it's characters being pretty faithfully reproduced. And lastly, the game is only the first episode in the series, meaning that if the devs are smart, they’ll fix this game up the next time around.

Unfortunately, while a generically titled beat-em-up game of this caliber wouldn’t feel so bad, the fact that it is an official Watchmen product taints my experience greatly. While the developers seem to have tried their best to inject some references and cameos from the original, the story is trite and clichéd, a mockery of the complexity and immersive nature of the source material. The cut scenes have been done to look like an comic, but unfortunately, the animation and direction is so terrible that they're more funny than interesting. The voice acting is very solid (Patrick Wilson and Jackie Earl Haley reprising their roles), but the writing is not and more often than not their talent is wasted on some extremely painful dialogues. Overall, The End is Nigh is a fun if very repetitive title. However, as a prequel to Watchmen, it’s quite insulting.