First and foremost, let’s get this straight. Generally, I hate movie/game conversions. They are rarely enjoyable and I find them to be a shameless cash-in on whatever franchise is being punted at the time; be it a DC superhero that’s been dug out of the obscure woodwork such as Jonah Rex or Red (good grief) or a well known icon like Thor…

Let’s focus on Thor for a second. The toys, game and all sorts of other paraphernalia came out of the woodwork at least a month before the movie appeared in mind boggling 3D (do not partake with a hangover) and the cam pirates set up their little pirate machines. In essence; what this gave the potential viewer was a mouth watering tidbit of what to expect from a movie which one could see that the studios went all-out for effects wise, possibly to one-up the fairly coinciding release of the Green Lantern. Tell you what; though, anybody who had actually played Thor the game was a little less amped to go see what the movie had to offer.

I digress. Let’s head back to good old Cap! I popped this game in with much misgiving, and as I started to play I wasn’t pleasantly surprised. Here’s why:

The plot focuses on a rather scrawny individual by the name of Steve Rogers, the kind of guy always picked last when it came to the sporty endeavors, but still a likable enough guy. He fails the military physical exam and the powers that be decide that he is not a suitable candidate for anything more than a government worker bee. The super soldier serum the government produces fixes all that, transforming Mr. Rogers into Mr. “Mini Hulk” with a full on Johnson for waving the American flag and bringing evil doers to justice – just like the movie.

The gameplay caught my attention instantaneously. For some reason, it was so familiar at the time that I had to laugh. Why? I was playing Batman: Arkham Asylum! Cap is a hand to hand combat based guy, his fighting ability is unprecedented and he has a sort of sixth sense about him that’s able to counter the guy he’s not even looking at at that stage – just like Batman!

The game has linearity about it. However, through a series of unlocked sewer paths, Cap is able to negotiate the entire game through a backtrack system in order to collect things he might have missed when that part of the castle was relevant – just like Batman!

There are even 10 challenges, all of which you unlock once you have finished the game and certain trophies and MS points are awarded for achieving gold medals for completing these challenges within the allotted amount of time … You guessed it – just like Batman!

While the game pays a certain amount of homage to our noble Dark Knight, that’s about where the fondness ends, I’m afraid. Cap has to collect a number of things on his journey through Baron Zemo’s castle, among them a personal account of the Baron’s dealings with the Red Skull. Obviously a trophy is awarded for finding all 31 of these objects, ranging from bottles of Stein to gauntlets and even a porcelain rooster. I had two problems with the collectables: one was that you had to collect ceramic eggs scattered all throughout the game, 50 to be precise. I searched high and low for these eggs and obtained all 50, only to end up finding an extra 15 eggs? It left me feeling: ”Oh well, so I could have breezed through the game and not searched every nook and cranny and still have achieved my 50, what a let-down”. The second problem I had was with the blueprint collectables. These blueprints actually gave Cap an advantage over his opponents by helping him understand weaknesses in the enemy designs and exploit them. For example, one blueprint would let the enemy lay stunned for a while longer. There is also a trophy for collecting all blueprints – one which I had to miss seeing, as the game I played had a glitch where I could not use my acrobatics to proceed to the higher ledge and obtain the last blueprint. What a disappointment.

The enemy AI was equally useless and fully predictable too, all I had to do was wait for them to make their move and counter, this took a lot of the fun out of fighting them, especially since I could actually run into a room, throw the mighty shield and stun at least 5 guys at a time, thereby just picking them off as I saw fit.

I could bring up a whole lot more detail about this game‚ actually, but that would see to it that I actually would be required to remember a bit more about this drivel that I wasted roughly 15 hours on, mindlessly wandering from one stage of this 18 episode debacle to the next. In its favor, though; the graphics are not hideous, they did indeed set a 1940’s scene and did the game a bit of justice.

In closing, this game is a trophy whore’s dream as the trophies are easy to obtain and the skilled hunter could easily play this one seeing as you are not required to finish this one on hard (Yippee! I wish more games would incorporate that!). With games like Batman: Arkham City and Uncharted 3 almost here? Give this one a miss unless you are really bored.