Wii Review: Captain America: Super Soldier

Hardly a super soldier’s game…

Another example of why games based on films don’t work is Captain America: Super Soldier. It tries to follow the plot of the recent film while trying to compete with Arkham Asylum as a great comic-book game, but alas while its intentions are good, the game itself is repetitive, short and flawed.

You obviously play as Captain America and fight off the Red Skull’s minions, unfortunately the cutscenes are atrocious to look at and don’t give any reason to pay attention to the story. Captain America tries to play like Batman’s best game with its combat system, which is undoubtedly Super Soldier’s greatest strength, but the game is designed in a linear fashion of going from point A to point B while looking for collectables along the way, unlike Arkham Asylum’s almost Metroid-vania feeling.

Captain America uses his shield to throw at objects such as explosive barrels, switches and enemies, some enemies have guns to shoot you but it doesn’t do as much damage as it would do to the Dark Knight and you can easily fight them off with button-bashing as opposed to the traditional counter-attacking and combos of AA. There are platforming sections in Super Soldier that are poor, while the whole formula of the game is repetitive.

You aim a reticule then hit a button to throw the shield, but it’s a pain and inaccurate. You can also wiggle the nunchuk to throw the shield, but it seems pointless since you can do it with the tap of a button. The real shame about Super Soldier is that it has good intentions and actually decent gameplay, but it just replays the moments over so much that it becomes redundant and repetitive within such a short time that you’ll be begging for the end to come, which is fortunate since it comes so soon but unfortunate if you’ve splashed out a huge chunk of money for the game.

The presentation for Super Soldier lets it down in a big way. It’s a below average looking game with mediocre looking levels, poor character models and the animations are awful. Voice-acting is cheesy and the music is forgettable.

The Verdict

Captain America: Super Soldier is yet another bad movie-game. It has some good ideas, although hardly original ones…it takes a lot of inspiration from Arkham Asylum, it’s just a shame they didn’t take it further beyond the combat, if they had then it might have been a must-have instead of the end result which is an average, repetitive game that isn’t worth the price of admission.