Free Play! Watchmen: The End is Nigh

Under review is the demo version available on Xbox Live. I have little interest in forking out for the full episode. We were promised something along the lines of Mayfair's largely forgotten Who Watches the Watchmen? role playing scenario. That game, an award winning Alan Moore collaboration, featured minor Minuteman Captain Metropolis bungling a clandestine scheme to draw the abortive Crimebusters team together. Machiavelli he ain't. What did we get instead? Squaresoft's The Bouncer, oozing warts and all, in Snyderverse drag. Ho hum! So out goes everyone's favourite homosexual racist Nelson Gardner (and all attendant side-story manoeuvering), in comes grime sheen interpretations of Nite Owl II and Rorschach, battling up and down nondescript prisonscapes. Lead pipes, and fun, perpetually out of reach.

That's right, Deadline games have chosen to interpret Moore and Gibbons' obsessively layered monument to detail as that simplest of gaming genres: the scrolling brawler. The studio have also elected to execute this transition with a complete absence of flair, presenting a game that is mechanically shallow even when compared to 1989's Neanderthal example Final Fight. To their credit, Deadline did remember to mix up the rote thumping with the occasional switch pull sequence. Remember folks, pressing buttons in sequence with on-screen prompts counts as puzzle solving! What generosity!

Players choose between Dreiberg and Kovacs, a slither of differences existing between the characters; a two player option is also available. Snyder actors Patrick Wilson and Jackie Earl Haley have recorded some dialogue snatches scattered about gameplay, the exchanges casting Moore's characters as a thug take on Hawk and Dove. Kovacs spills laboured right-winging rhetoric, while Dreiberg bumbles around lefty tract. It's both a nice nod to Rorschach's Ditko derived beginnings, and a chronic mishandling of Moore's text. Indigestion bubbled when Nite Owl started to fall-in with Rorschach's confused 'fuck everybody!' mutterings.

Also worth mentioning is the motion comic cut-scene sequence in which a faithfully rendered (lifted?) Dave Gibbons' Rorschach interacts with the movie design Nite Owl II. It's rather strange seeing the rounded, naturalistic Gibbons' figure in such close proximity to the spiky Bat flavoured redesign. Flat and unexciting for the most part, the short is at least faithful to John Higgins' bold, poisonous palette.

Watchmen: The End is Nigh's only real highlight is the effect suffering repeated beatings has on the in-game camera - the view cants as if the player were deep in a 60s Batman supervillain liar. Grasping, I know. File under Stink, for Stinker.