On paper, Pacific Rim was a nerd’s dream; a $200 million homage to giant robot anime and classic monster movies with spectacular effects. In reality, it was more like Independence Day with robots and dinosaurs than anything resembling the movies it supposedly pays tribute. The premise seems perfectly suited to a videogame, so here the promise is sky high as well, but like its cinematic counterpart Pacific Rim is little more than a feeble collection of tropes.
Don’t expect King of Monsters here. This is a straightforward Infinity Blade clone like so many others. You’re fixed in place, squaring off against various Kaiju, with only the ability to dodge, block, and swipe to attack (plus a couple of specials). It’s a set-up that seems all too familiar, but it’s one that has certainly worked before. There isn’t a lot of originality here, with a heavy reliance on parrying being perhaps its primary distinguishing feature.
Everything looks nice enough, and the graphics scale appropriately to a wide range of hardware. On high-end handsets, it’s actually an impressive-looking game, with both the Jaegers and the Kaiju sporting a lot of tiny details. These in-game graphics are just about all the presentation has going for it, however. The film’s story – clichéd though it was – is almost entirely absent here, and when you’re not in battle, you’ll just be staring at some boring menus. There’s almost nothing here to look at when you aren’t engaged in a fight.
More troubling is the fact that this is simply a slow, dull game compared to other titles in the genre. Most of these games base their challenge on reading the fluid, unpredictable movements of your opponent and learning to react accordingly. By comparison, the Kaiju’s movements are slow and obvious, and most of the challenge comes from the slow reaction time of your Jaeger, coupled with a general ambiguity about when an enemy is vulnerable to attack. These games are only as interesting as the enemies you fight, and most of Pacific Rim’s enemies are not very interesting.
And be prepared to face those same boring enemies a lot. Although there are nine different types of Kaiju in the game, they’re introduced slowly, forcing you to fight palette-swapped versions of the same enemies over and over again, sometimes multiple times in a row. There are some RPG elements, but the spoils of battle are so meager that one can’t help but feel like this is just a nudge toward in-app purchases, which shouldn’t be acceptable in a $5.00 game.
Pacific Rim probably won’t fare any better for those who enjoyed the movie. While the game nails the movie’s look, it really doesn’t capture much else. There’s no environmental destruction, very little sense of scale, and even the cheesy plot is gone. In its stead we have a dull, uncreative game that doesn’t even stand up to the likes of Death Dome.
