The 1980's animated series G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero famously featured a series of good-natured public service announcements. These PSAs taught youngsters safety lessons, like not to play with electrical wires and to be careful with campfires. They did not, however, tell you not to play G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, so if you need an official warning, let this be it: Don't do it! Even in the realm of licensed tie-ins, this monotonous third-person action game is particularly poor, managing not only to screw up the mechanics it rips off from other games, but also failing to get even the basics right. An awful camera, atrocious vehicle sequences, and dreadful storytelling are just a few of the inhumanities you'll face on this mission to spoil the latest scheme from the terrorist group Cobra. Local co-op play eases the tedium and frustrations, but even the closest of friends can't rescue you from this snake's venomous fangs. So now you know--and knowing is half the battle.


G.I. Joe borrows liberally from Contra and Gears of War. You and another Joe (controlled either by another player or the AI) run through a series of 3D environments, blasting everything in sight to earn points and occasionally taking cover and popping out to fire at the more resilient nasties. Bringing enemies down consists mostly of holding down a button to shoot and hitting another one to tumble or hide behind conspicuously placed barriers. There should have been fun here. With more than a dozen different characters to unlock and play, G.I. Joe could have delivered action enthusiasts some fast-paced gunplay, or amused franchise fans with a fun and entertaining story. Instead, you get ugly cutscenes, bad dialogue, and deadpan voice acting that expresses all the excitement of a long yawn. And the gameplay itself is not only sloppy and boring, but it fails to get a number of essentials right.

G.I. Joe's fixed camera is the first example of a simple ingredient gone sour. You get absolutely no camera control. As you traverse the environments, approach downward slopes, and turn corners, the camera will swoop around to give you what is apparently intended to be a proper view of the proceedings. But it leads to disaster. You'll be shot at from offscreen enemies, or have to run toward the camera, unable to see where you are going. When the camera view suddenly flips while you are moving, the controls often won't adjust properly, so your Joe may go running off in some direction other than the one you intended. Plenty of games with fixed or semifixed cameras have managed these camera shifts properly; there's no excuse for the issues here. Things become even more disastrous when you jump into any of the game's slippery vehicles. You always push an analog stick forward to move the vehicle forward, but your view of the action may be from the side, from slightly above, or even from in front. And the camera will move about as you drive, forcing you to constantly rethink which direction you need to push the stick in to make the tank move in the direction you want it to go.

Another standard component done poorly: the targeting system. The Rise of Cobra selects a target for you automatically. If you are using the Wii Remote and Nunchuk (the Classic Controller is also supported; motion controls are not), you can switch targets using the d-pad, but this is clumsy and uncomfortable. To make matters worse, if you take cover and select any enemy other than the default target, the game will automatically switch your target back to the default if you don't fire for a few seconds. Why? Who knows. The fact that you can fire at certain power-ups to reap their benefits only complicates matters. The game doesn't distinguish among foes that can hurt you, buildings that cannot, and these score-enhancing cubes. Thus, you'll be surrounded by Cobra grunts but firing at some offscreen power-up because the game can't prioritize a dude with a gun over a harmless cube hovering in the air. When an enemy does fall, the targeting may not lock on to nearby foes because they are behind you--which happens often, given the rotten camera. If you play on the middle or upper difficulty level, you may die once or twice, almost always because of the awful camera or the awful targeting.