As fan of the original Total Recall film and also looking forward to the upcoming remake, this game was a must have. Coming from Jump games at a price of £0.63 I present what is the most recent in straight from the big screen games: Total Recall.
Jump have decided to make this game a first person rail shooter. The storyline is given to you by comic strips between missions, leaving the missions themselves free to just shoot hell out of the enemies. As far as can be seen so far it sticks quite closely to the plot of the film (Bearing in mind we only have 8 missions thus far and the remake is yet to be released). There is a large array of weapons available that can be purchased with money earned from the missions, as well as medi kits, armour and attack boosters.
Graphically the game is great, everything looks the part and the environment seems fairly realistic. The control system is fairly simple with 7 buttons: A button to fire, one to reload , one to change weapons, one to crouch/hide, one to aim, one to use a medi kit and one to use an attack booster. Dragging your finger across the screen will move the cross-hair to aim. Sadly this is very poor, the movement on this feature is very slow and sluggish, even on the highest sensitivity setting. This may sound petty but the length of time taken to reach a new enemy results in getting hit a fair few times.
Sadly with this game, like a lot of other recent releases, we see a lot of in app purchases. Certain weapons are only available via in game gold which of course you have to buy. I can understand the need for this from developers of games that are free but in a game you pay for anyway, why add in app purchases as well?
My final issue with the game is the fact that it is a first person rail shooter. For me this style of game is designed for arcades, for games such as Time Crisis with a gun controller. Even on console games, the first person rail shooter only really works with a gun controller. Now I’m not judging the game purely because I don’t like this type of game. In Total Recall the “rail” you move on seems to move you to very random locations and can take a good 15 seconds of pointlessly moving backwards and forwards before reaching the next horde of enemies. It seems the game could be severely improved if you could freely move around the map.
Final thoughts? Well with a story line such as Total Recall we have the basis of a good game here. If only Jump hadn’t gone with the first person rail shooter and could improve the sluggish aiming on the game. Perhaps the game will improve as more missions are released. Maybe it is just a game that will grow on people, after all there are only 8 missions currently.
Our Rating 3/5:
[appbar id="com.jumpgames.TotalRecall&feature"]
