STORY:
We start out our journey on the island of Paxos, home to our hero Perseus and his family. The island worships the gods and the soldiers of Argos have set fit to destroy their belief’s. Without going into the story too much this is where things kind of fall flat. Any good lover of film or video game adaptations knows that taking too much creative license with the source material is not necessarily a good thing. While taking a slightly new twist to the original story can work in some occasions, Clash often hits a lot of roadblocks that leaves players scratching their heads. What really throws things off is that the characters are really hard to follow.
GAMEPLAY:
The gameplay in Clash is somewhat of the saving grace of an otherwise flat movie to video game adaptation. You play as Perseus and set out on several quests using normal quest ‘hubs’. Taking from traditional action RPGs, the quest givers have a symbol over their heads and are easy to find.
The controls in Clash are almost identical to other action RPG titles. The left control stick move Perseus while the right one rotates the camera. As this is a third-person game, it is not shocking at all that the camera becomes more of an enemy rather than a friend in battle. The button commands are your attacks with one giving a light swing and the other a heavy. You also have a secondary attack which uses the shoulder button.
Once you get a quest you need to make your to a designated location on your mini-map. This loads up an instance-like encounter for your given quest. This was almost like entering a dungeon each time and the associated gameplay got old with waves of baddies continuously spawning until the boss mob showed up. This was very repetitive and just did not make for a fun gaming experience. It felt like you were doing the same set of attacks over and over again until the level ended. Coupled with the lack of story direction, there was just no real reason to be doing what you are doing. One other problem I found with the combat was how easy the enemies were to defeat in battle.
There was a certain mission where you end up fighting a blue dragon whelp and all it took to kill the monster was the spamming of an attack button. This also felt like the old school ‘Blanka cheating’ I hated so much in Street Fighter II. With that being said the good part of the fights were the tons different type of monsters that were thrown at the player.
The light at the end of the tunnel with the gameplay is the great amount of upgrades for your weapons. As you kill monsters, they drop weapons or items used to upgrade your arsenal. You can also combo-break your enemies to steal their weapons to add to your collection. These weapons can be added to your secondary attack selection and are close to instant kills in the game. As you collect more drops you can upgrade your weapons in the game to add additional attacks. This kept the otherwise stale gameplay fresh as you can pull off some pretty nifty-looking combos with the secondary weapons. The downside to this is that there was no real use to use them as you could just as easily use your standard sword over and over again.
SOUND AND GRAPHICS:
The graphics in Clash were a bit sub-par for the Xbox 360. While the environments are rich and beautiful, the character models are simply horrendous. Almost all the NPC models looked exactly alike and the main characters looked nothing like those found in the movie. The one exception was Hades but I have a sneaking suspicion they just used a Rob Zombie model. Throughout the game I found several tears in the graphics and glitches with the models. The FPS really bogged down during some of the more intense fight scenes.
The sound in Clash was average at best. The ambient background sounds helped make the world come alive and the sound effects were pretty spot-on. The big problem with the sound was the lack of the voice actors from the film. If you are going to port over a movie, using the original actors is a must. Without them it just leads the player away from the story and doesn’t hook them in. If this is not possible then spend some extra cash to get quality voice actors and not cheesy impersonators.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
Clash of The Titans was a disappointment. I am a big fan of the original movie and love stories about the Greek gods – this just did not live up. If you plan on playing this game then I would suggest a rental. Anything more then that you are better off buying the God of War series.
