Jason D'Aprile

Clash of the Titans Review

By Jason D'Aprile - Posted Jul 29, 2010

20 Comments

Clash of the Titans is being remade yet again and this time, it's from a cheesy 3D movie to a truly awful video game. Not even the greatest heroes of Ancient Greece could ever save this disaster.

The Pros
  • Some interesting monsters
  • Lots of potential weapons
  • It ends...eventually
The Cons
  • Cheesy, choppy graphics
  • Lousy gameplay
  • Lame combat, terrible AI, horrible camera...horrible everything else

For fans of cheesy B-movies, the re-make of Clash of the Titans was something of a guilty pleasure. A big budget mixed with huge CG effects, terrible dialogue, a goofy story, and insane amounts of over (and under) acting made the flick seem like a SyFy Channel movie that accidentally hit your local multiplex. It wasn’t a good movie, but it was, at least, amusing for the right audience. Sadly, if there’s a right audience for the game adaptation out there, I don’t want to know about them.

Oh Look, Another Bad Movie Game!

As gamers, we’re used to horrible games based on movies, so it’s not a surprise to anyone that there’s nothing redeeming about the Clash of the Titans game. What is surprising is that even by the incredibly low standards set for licensed games, Clash falls far short. 

As expected, you take the role of the gruff pretty boy, Perseus, a demi-god, spawned of Zeus, but raised by a kindly fisherman and his wife. Monsters run amok, the city of Argos is embroiled in a war with the gods, and ancient Greece needs a manly-man champion. Cue Perseus and his gleaming muscles. Had Clash simply stuck religiously to the God of War motif and focused on streamlined carnage, it might have stood a chance. After all, there are plenty of great monsters and gods to use for meat bag battering sessions, even if Kratos has torn through all of them before. Instead, Clash made some minor attempts to distance itself from such obvious comparisons, much to its detriment.


 Secondary Weapons and Primary Mediocrity

At first, the game almost seems to have a Zelda-meets-God of War vibe. You start in a small town, ignorant of your future greatness, and run around talking to townsfolk who have various tasks for you to perform. As it turns out, the game has about 100 of these tasks. Few of them take longer than ten minutes, and they all boil down to engaging in brain dead, tedious combat set in short and constraining levels. Invisible barriers abound, monsters are repetitive, and the gameplay almost never varies.

Where Clash tries to add a little something extra is in the secondary weapons. These weapons are stolen from weakened enemies through a simplistic quick time mechanic, and each one has a special use. A huge hammer can destroy obstacles for instance, and more powerful enemies are frequently only susceptible to a single weapon. Such enemies are annoying frustrations until you figure out the correct weapon. Figuring out which weapon to use turns out to be pretty simple: it’s whatever weapon at least one of the endlessly respawning drones are carrying.

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Repetitive Repetition Over and Over

The drones endlessly respawn because attacking with secondary weapons uses energy, which is also gained from weakened opponents. In order to upgrade your secondary weapon, you must repeatedly steal the same weapon from enemies, which turns any joy players might have felt from trying so many different attack methods into painful tedium.

Normal attacks include the usual light and heavy options, but the character animation and combat mechanics are so awful that fighting just feels like an annoying, never-ending, button-mashing endurance test. The enemy and ally AI are utterly brain dead as well. The game does allow cooperative play during segments where Perseus brings friends, but even that doesn’t help much.

Finally, there are remarkably mediocre graphics to go along with the terrible animation. The voice acting is wooden to say the least, and there’s little in the presentation that could hope to save this sinking ship.
 


Behold! The God of Crap!

Clash of the Titans is the worst kind of movie game. By looks alone, it could easily be mistaken for an early PS2 game, and the gameplay mechanics are lousy by any system’s standard. The game could have tried to provide a God of War alternative with some light RPG elements, but it missed every single element that makes a game worth playing including good gameplay and any sense of pacing. Even if you loved the movie, there’s not a single reason to pick up this game.

Really? You still want to play it? Well, you should definitely rent it from Gamefly.