But can you forget it for me wholesale?
Hollywood’s recent treatment of Total Recall, more a riff on Philip K. Dick’s novella, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” than the campy Schwarzenegger vehicle, was doubtlessly a disappointment. A licensed game based on the property, however, seems like an easy sell. The paranoid, surreal cyberpunk dystopia of Dick’s short-form thriller seems like the perfect backdrop for a Deus Ex-like first-person adventure, with stealth, action, and conspiracies to unravel.
Jump Games has opted to ignore all of that potential for a quick cash-run of a much smaller scope. The resulting game is a pedestrian arcade rail shooter marred by the inclusion of first-person shooter and RPG elements that interfere with the arcade action that.
This is a simple affair, not dissimilar from Time Crisis or Virtua Cop. You have no control over your character’s movement, and need to focus only on aiming and shooting at enemies as they emerge from behind cover. The enemies have no AI, and simply repeat their scripted actions in timed loops. This is all well and good, except it controls like a first person shooter, forcing players to rotate and aim their guns rather than intuitively tapping where they want to shoot. The mechanic is awkward in light of a game that offers no ability to defend or dodge other than the occasional ability to tap a cover button.
Even worse, Jump Games has included upgrades and limited use items that completely undermine the arcade-like purity of a rail shooter. Allowing players to simply purchase enough health packs to survive any level completely destroys the challenge – and appeal – of the straightforward action. Not only that, but this strategy seems absolutely necessary as beating levels without taking damage seems literally impossible. These elements seem to be included simply to justify in-app purchases, even though they completely undermine any sense of coherent game design. This is further reinforced by the fact that most of the game’s guns can only be bought with “gold,” a currency that cannot be earned by simply playing the game, no matter how long.
One can’t help but shake the feeling that this product was rushed, and if you know anything about developing games for a movie license, it almost certainly was. The art and sound design are actually not bad, but the game is barebones, and woefully brief. In fact, it’s not even playable to the end, with the game’s later levels still marked as “coming soon.” The menus tease plenty of future stages and even episodes, but the game in its current form is incomplete.
My heart goes out to developers that have to compromise their vision and rush their product to market in order to coincide with the release of a movie, but these concerns are far less forgivable in the fast-paced world of mobile development, where polished games are often made in a few months. What we have here is a game that is not only rough and unpolished, but so severely limited on a base level that there’s almost no appeal. What value it had in its arcade simplicity is completely undermined by its economy/upgrade system that allows players to purchase victory. Total Recall is not just a waste of time, it’s a waste of potential.