- Platform:
- Xbox 360 (Xbox Live Arcade).
- Developer:
- Deadline Games.
- Writer:
- Len Wein.
- Cast:
- Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley.
Rorschach works out some of his issues with women.
Released in two parts — March and July 2009, respectively — The End is Nigh is something of a prequel to the Watchmen film and comic book series, set in 1972, before the passing of the Keane Act that outlawed masked vigilantes.
In the first part, Rorschach (voiced by Jackie Earle Haley) and Daniel “Nite Owl” Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson) set out to quell a prison riot at Sing Sing. The riot turns out to be a diversion for the escape of crime lord The Underboss, and our caped crusaders end up fighting their way through criminals and cops alike trying to find him, and possibly stop the plot to kill two reporters at The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The second part concerns the kidnapping of a girl named Violet Greene, and finds Nite Owl and Rorscach chasing Twilight Lady through strip clubs and brothels, fighting gangs, gimps, and dominatrices. (The voice acting of the gimps and doms is quite funny, especially the ball-gagged ones.)
Throughout the game(s), we’re treated to an ongoing debate between Nite Owl and Rorschach about society’s ills and how best to fix them. Rorschach, as you might’ve guessed, thinks the answer is violence and lots of it, while Daniel is mostly just along for the ride, hoping to convince Rorschach that not everything is black and white — or failing that, at least rein him in a bit.
The gameplay of The End Is Nigh is right up Rorschach’s street, consisting as it does of all ass-kicking all the time. Well, there’s some lock picking, too, (and quite fun lock picking at that) but it’s optional. Basically, it’s Double Dragon in HD. The graphics are gorgeous, with well-crafted textures, animations, and effects, but the gameplay and level-design are one-note and get repetitive fast. The game feels like just a bunch of rooms full of people to beat up, interrupted occasionally by cut-scenes to move the plot along.
The juxtaposition of Watchmen‘s complex, cerebral world with the mindless violence of the game makes for a dissonant experience, highlighted by the disconnect between the gameplay and Rorschach and Nite Owl’s ongoing commentary — their pontificating about the causes and remedies of crime while beating up ball-gagged gimps, with plenty of slow-motion bone crunching, reads almost as self parody.
There’s a disconnect also between the controls and the level design: the fighting in End Is Nigh, with it’s combos and counters, feels better suited to one-on-one fights than to the one-on-dozens fights the game pits you in. This is the big reason the fights are so repetitive; because most of the combos don’t really work in the situations you find yourself in, you end up sticking to the same counter-punching strategy every time. It gets old — especially since the enemies don’t really get any harder as the game progresses; there are more of them, and they take longer to dispatch, but it never gets any harder. And since the game has nothing else than fighting to offer and since it’s such a short gamei, there just isn’t enough there to warrant a purchase. 2400 Microsoft Points (around €30) is a lot to pay for a short, shallow, repetitive beat-’em-up, no matter how pretty the rain effects are.
- Especially part 2, which while it feels like an interminable chase sequence, is over just as the story gets interesting. ↩
