Generator Rex Agent of Providence Review (Playstation 3)

Generator Rex is a decent show. It’s no Sealab 2021 or Aqua Teen Hunger force, but it’s also not the worst cartoon on the air these days. Unfortunately, the game is far closer to the bottom of the pile than the top. I started watching the cartoon when I knew the game was coming for review which then led to some lofty expectations apparently because what Virtuos the developer have slipped past Activision on this one is, in a word, pathetic.

In the game you take on the role of, yep, Rex, the hero of the cartoon. He’s got nanintes in his body that give him special powers which manifest themselves as machine-like body parts. These include things like cannons, swords, gigantic fists, powerful legs for better jumping, etc.

After about 30 minutes of play, I was pretty fed up with the game overall. The control scheme is terrible, the environments are limited, it’s completely on rails, the gameplay is repetitive and the graphics are Wii-level. On top of that, they talk, inessantly about the most useless stuff. It’s like they wanted to take the characters from the show and really let them be the two-dimensional artificial constructs they are. The game often interrupts the action for some pointless dialog between Rex and one of the other characters who is not even present.

Rex can create seven builds:

• Smack Hands - giant fists
• Punk Busters - giant spiked boots
• BFS - a giant sword
• Slam Cannon - a large missile launcher
• Blast Caster - a whip
• bad axes - two gigantic aces
• Funchuks - really they’re more like two giant flails

Yep, that’s it. Apparently, just making large versions of basic weapons was their recipe for success. While each of the weapons serves a specific purpose in the contrived combat and levels, they’re far from interesting. Several of the weapons are ponderous and fairly useless much of the time. Every combat was created to take the thought process and strategy away and force you into using a particular weapon to be successful. So in other words, it’s a mindless button-mashing, repetitive third-person action game on rails. Every level sees you running long distances through alleys that end in some fight against numerous enemies until the blockade is opened and you can continue. The whole game seems to progress like this. Run, fight, run, fight. To change things up, they will throw in a walking sequence, which means you have to slowly walk through an uninteresting area to get to the next attack by your enemies.