My two biggest loves as a kid - after Star Wars, of course - were GI Joe and the Transformers. Unfortunately, neither property had enough video games when I was growing up. I owned a GI Joe game and a Transformers game on my Commodore 64, both of which sucked even by the standards of the time. But I still played the hell out of them.
The GI Joe game was especially fun with friends. It was basically a one-on-one deathmatch between two players (or 1 player vs CPU). You each picked a character (12 Joes, 8 Cobras), and you would just wander around the screen shooting each other. After each shot, you had to wait several seconds for your weapon to reload.
The different characters had different walking speeds, weapon speeds, and weapon power. It was balanced so that the characters with the slowest weapons did the most damage. There was also a vehicle mode where you picked one of four different Joe vehicles, and just drove/flew around shooting at Cobra vehicles.
Honestly, it was a bad game. The load times were excruciating, the gameplay was simplistic, and the only reason my friends and I enjoyed it was because of the toy tie-in. And yet, I think I'd still rather play it again than the newest GI Joe game, Operation Blackout.
Now, I knew going in that Operation Blackout wasn't very good. I'd read several negative reviews, and really wasn't expecting much from it. I'd already played the beautiful but underwhelming "Transformers: Devastation" a few years ago, and was expecting something about on the same level. The trailers for Operation Blackout at least looked kind of neat, with cel-shaded graphics reminiscent of the 80s cartoon.
Where do I begin. For starters, somehow the graphics look better in the videos than they do while you're playing. While Devastation did a great job nailing the look of the Transformers cartoon, Operation Blackout looks like an early attempt at cel shading from the mid 2000s.
The controls are serviceable, but I have to question some of the gameplay choices. Like, you have a reload button, which you end up having to use every 10 seconds. I mean, this isn't Call of Duty, this is G.I.-frikking-Joe here, based on a cartoon where nobody ever ran out of ammo. I don't need simulationist gameplay in my 80s nostalgia.
The mission objectives are sometimes unclear, the boss fights take forever, and the difficulty is... well, I won't say it's hard, but I will say that the easiest setting still wasn't as easy as one might expect. Also, I played through one of the blandest vehicle levels I've ever seen in a video game.
But I think the worst part is the overall presentation. Between levels the story plays out in cut scenes that are supposed to look like a comic book. Unfortunately, they don't. Instead, they just look like early storyboard sketches, as if they intended to animate them eventually and and never got around to it.
And the voice acting is so inconsistent. I swear the voice actors kept changing their minds on how they wanted to play certain characters. Destro starts out sounding like a generic Doctor Doom voice, then switches to a Scottish accent, which gradually fades into a more generic foreign accent. And don't get me started on Storm Shadow, whose voice would probably get them accused of racism if this game were good enough to get noticed at all. At least Cobra Commander was... okay.
Now, I don't regret my purchase. For one thing, I waited until the game was on sale. For another, I used reward points to buy it, so it was practically free. I knew what I was getting into, and it was worth the money to play it for myself. I don't mind bad games if they tickle the right nostalgia button, but this game doesn't quite reach it.
Here's a longplay of Operation Blackout (not mine):
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