No one watches the Watchmen in this bland game.

 

There have been a lot of claims that Watchmen was the one property that was unfilmable. The book's complexity and multiple story arcs made for a piece of art that was definitely tailored to the comic book medium. While the quality of the movie is up for debate amongst fans(I liked it), the games that were spawned from the Warner Bros marketing machine definitely prove the fact that Watchmen doesn't transfer to gaming well at all.

 

Watchmen: Justice is Coming is an MMORPG for the iPhone in the loosest sense of the word. The game takes place in 1975, a few years before the Keene Act was passed which outlawed masked adventurers in Watchmen's alternate version of the United States. You play as your custom avatar who just arrived in New York City to find your sister, who moved to New York to be an actress and has now gone missing.  After creating your account, you are then asked to view an ink blot and pick one of four options determining what it looks like to you. This doesn't seem to have any bearing on what kind of character you will be produced with and just seems like an empty attempt to make a connection the source material. Nevertheless, I took my vigilante, The Winged Badger, into seedy New York to start on my quest to find my little sister.

 

 

Of course, this wouldn't be so hard if the game didn't make so many weird decisions in its design. To start, there is no quest log. As soon as you drop into the game world, you are given one paragraph of exposition and are told to try and find your estranged sibling. There are no logs or arrows pointing you where to go next and the map only shows you the different districts. You are forced to wander around until you find that one NPC with the yellow exclamation above their head. I walked around for 30 minutes trying to find this NPC and when I did, I was rewarded with another paragraph of story and sent on my way to find the next NPC. 

 

 As you wander, you can run into enemy characters who are characterized by a red exclamation mark. If you make contact, the game loads into a battle screen which plays out like a game of rock, paper, scissors except with your fists. You can choose from three types of attacks from your repertoire, each having a different value to it. Some attacks may be fast and strike first or are lumbering and powerful. They each share a triangular relationship, such as picking fast attacks to beat slow ones or Medium attacks to beat fast ones. It's not a hard system to learn, but it's not rewarding in the least bit. Attacks are blandly animated and the characters walk as if they has sticks taped to their spines.

 

The game is an MMO and there are other players walking around just as lost as you are. There were frequent chat messages asking people where they need to go or how to fight.  You can team up with these players or engage in PVP matches. Teaming up or participating in PVP with others doesn't seem to bestow any sort of benefit on you though and feels like a waste of time.

 

 

The game is a technical mess as well. Animations are broken and missing entire frames. Characters will float into each other or attacks will glide through bodies. Lockups are common and sometimes menus will cease to work. It's a buggy nightmare at times and just a chore to navigate through. This is not something that you should deal with when you're trying to get some game time in while on your communte or waiting in line.

 

The one redeeming quality of the game is the visual representation of the book's alternate New York. The city is replicated almost flawlessly, with such landmarks as the kissing silhouettes and the Gunga Diner. You can travel to the cemetary to find The Comedian's grave or walk through an alley way reading, "Who watches the Watchmen?" on the wall. It just breaths atmosphere and is impressive.

 

Watchmen: Justice is Coming feels very much like a game space from Playstation Home. There isn't much to do and it feels like it exists solely as a vehicle to market you the movie and DVDs. Stay away from it and read the book instead. It's far more satisfying.

 

 

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