The Jason Bourne books have been around for almost thirty years but have had resurgence with Hollywood finally turning the books into a successful movie franchise starring Matt Damon. The series follows the adventures of a secret agent trained by a secret government agency who has his memory erased when a hit goes bad. The story follows Bourne as he recalls and escape the violent life he used to lead. Given the success of the movies and the depth of the franchise it was only a matter of time before someone turned it into a video game. Instead of a straight re-telling of the movie the folks at High Moon Studios worked in missions from the books to create a more complete storyline that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

As a fan of the movies I had fairly high expectations for the game and after playing through the game I’m happy to report that the game is a lot of fun. It’s not perfect, but it is a fairly solid action game that offers a good number of thrills and some new takes on the action game genre.

The first thing you’ll notice about the game is that Matt Damon is nowhere to be seen and honestly it doesn’t detract from the game at all as Bourne is supposed to be a faceless assassin. Sure Matt Damon and Franka Potente are prettier than their video game counterparts but their absence doesn’t take anything away from the game.

With Cyril taking on the Xbox 360 version of the game I was left to review the PS3 version of the game. This meant that I had to sit through the 15 minute install process which consumed a little over four and a half gigs of space on my PS3’s hard drive. Other than that the game is identical to the Xbox 360 version as the folks at High Moon decided not to put any SIXAXXIS tom-foolery into the game.

As you progress through the game you can switch between difficulty levels, which is helpful when you get stuck. I switched back and for the between the Agent and Trainee levels a few times during the six six hours it tookme to get through the game. That didn’t include a lot of time exploring the game to find find the passports hidden throughout the game or gain all of the game’s accomplishments. That puts the game a bit on the lean side of things when it comes to content but I’m not sure where they could have added much more content to the game without it coming off as filler. The game covers the first movie with flashback missions from the books tossed in to flesh things out a bit. That said it’s something that pushes the game more towards the “rental” side of the scale than the “own” side.



What differentiates Bourne from other third person action games is the visceral nature of the combat. They lifted the fighting style from the movie (literally as they had the fight coordinator from the movie on the payroll) so the melee combat is fast and brutal. The only problem is that Jason Bourne really only knows a few moves and while I didn’t get tired of them I think other gamers might get sick of pulling off the same combos over and over again. I think the designers missed an opportunity to leverage the memory loss part of the game as a mechanism to learn new combos as you progress through the game. This could even have been a reward for completing the flashback missions.

One area where the High Moon folks succeeded though is in the game’s takedown system. The game has an adrenaline meter on the bottom right side of the screen with four notches. As you land punches you earn adrenaline and when the adrenaline gets past a notch you can pull off a takedown which launches Bourne in...