The game Spider-Man 3 was a continuation of a well-received series, made by a respected developer, using a movie series which was a perfect fit for the type of game they were making. When Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End knocked it off the top of the charts, it continued a spring and summer of almost uninterrupted movie game bestsellers, but had little else in common.
There were no particularly loved Pirates of the Caribbean games to build on; as well as the third movie of its title, At World’s End covers the plot of the second film, which got a game but only on DS and PSP. Developers Eurocom were a less-than-renowned maker of ports and cheap licensed games, whose previous time at the top of the charts had been with the underwhelming game of the 2004 Olympics. And while swashbuckling adventures lent themselves a bit more obviously to a game than some historic movie-game successes, they held nothing with the same unique inherent appeal as giving Spider-Man the chance to swing around the whole city.
That purposelessness comes through in the game, with its largely linear 3D platformer-brawler stages taking different locations from the film and finding very video game ways to slow your progress through them, all crumbling ledges and battling hordes. The quality of the game’s construction is also as uneven throughout as those ledges. Characters look good at a distance, but close-up Jack Sparrow’s hair clips through his face. The game’s jump animations distractingly turn its characters into puppets whose strings have been yanked. I had fun at one point throwing coconuts at a gate made of a grid of bamboo poles, and watching them bounce off what should have been gaps. There is little polish to At World’s End, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t look surprisingly great at times. A paused moment of Will Turner tossing his sword to himself in silhouette, framed by a cave entrance out to a verdant island, made me stop to admire the scene in a way beaten only by Oblivion out of earlier Xbox 360 chart-toppers.
Zooming in to the combat that fills up most of At World’s End, there is once again an instructive comparison between it and its immediate predecessor at #1. The combat in Spider-Man 3 included a complex series of combinations, counterattacks which tested reaction speed, and all the tactical nuances of dealing with multiple enemies of different types as they attacked. The combat in At World’s End is nominally similar but includes only a dim notion of any of those things. Combos are limited and pointless. Each time you need to press a button to counter, you get about a week’s warning. And enemies queue up in single file for a beating. Yet of the two systems, I enjoyed At World’s End‘s more.
This is because beyond a certain point, making the annoying more sophisticated doesn’t actually help, but increasing the entertainment value does, and At World’s End succeeds there, intentionally or otherwise. If combat feels like an imposition anyway, I choose the trivial and ridiculous. When you chain a few attacks and your enemy choreographs sword clashes before turning their back on you, ready to be sliced down, the immensely stagey feel of it all is a good fit for the films.
And then there was my discovery that the grab attack is over-prioritised to such an extent that you can get through most fights just by pressing Y over and over again. Along the way this means enjoying the experience of throwing enemies down five-foot drops to their deaths and hearing them scream like they’ve gone over a cliff. That’s fine entertainment, though At World’s End finds ways to mess this simplicity up, like giving you multiple player characters to swap between in a fight, the better to show how poor its AI is as you have to swap in to save Will or Elizabeth or Jack before they take one too many hits from whatever they were doing which wasn’t just pressing Y.
The cheap and compromised nature of the game flows right through its course, including to its actors. There are strong positives to At World’s End having stand-ins for the film’s cast, given that it excludes Johnny Depp as well as avoiding anything like Tobey Maguire’s disinterested performance in the game of Spider-Man 3. But it doesn’t have any confidence in its stand-ins, making a marvellous effort to get across the studied oddness of Jack Sparrow’s physical mannerisms but undermining that by making him virtually silent throughout.
The biggest missed opportunities go back to the combat. I was trying my best to get through this entire post without reference to those other supernatural pirate adventure games inspired by Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride, but I don’t think any Monkey Island fan would be able to avoid thinking of it when enemies start punctuating swordfights with insults. “I can barely force myself to watch your clumsy moves”; “A child could fight with more skill than you”; “You give new meaning to the word pathetic”. They’re begging for pointed retorts (“I can see you’re intimately familiar with the old meaning”?), but none ever arrive. The characters are characters pretty much for cutscenes only, and those tend strongly to the briskly efficient, like someone’s got an eye on their treasure chest being emptied by the second.
This is extra frustrating because while barely sketching some parts of the films, the game remains determinedly tethered to their shape even at the expense of sacrificing pacing or bringing in other problems. The visual highlight I mentioned earlier came during the same level as you find yourself fighting the native cannibals from the second film. Importing nostalgic racism from source material without updating it, it’s the King Kong problem again but the harmful caricature comes off even worse when you have to spend a long time repetitively killing indistinguishable people.
The overall package of At World’s End is parts terrible, ludicrous, beautiful, entertaining and dull, in extremely uneven proportions. None of that is unique to cheaply made movie games, or even movie games more broadly. There is not an issue in At World’s End which isn’t also present in much more celebrated games. It just has all of those features in a particularly magnified way. It’s a product made just seaworthy enough to sell, visibly at the mercies of prevailing currents.
Top of the charts for week ending 2 June 2007:
