Beyond Co-Op Reviews: Pacific Rim: The Video Game

Pacific Rim fever hit me harder than an Elbow Rocket to the face on opening weekend. I turned my brain off and bore witness to Guillermo Del Toro's mighty robot Jaegers as they thrashed colossal Kaiju up and down a huge Imax screen. After it was all finished I was hooked. I needed so much more. Going against everything I know about licensed games, I decided to pick up the Pacific Rim XBLA game. I have one word of advice for you: Don't.

Technically, Pacific Rim: The Video Game isn't the worst game I played this month. It's definitely not the best. It's not even ok. It's pretty much what you'd expect it to be: a limited licensed game with bare-bones presentation and enough movie assets to make it a recognizable marketing tie-in.

Want to see it in motion? Here you go:

Pacific Rim is a very simple fighting game with some customization options hampered by poor controls, lousy visuals, repetitive gameplay, no story, and microtransactions. Yeah, that's right. After I plunked down ten bucks for this stinker they wanted to charge me for extra characters and stages. The game began with a measly three Jaegers and two Kaiju as playable fighters. Three other Kaiju were available for four bucks apiece. Unacceptable. I honestly forget how much they wanted for the extra stages, and since I feel the urge to kill rising I refuse to look it up.

After thumping a few Kaiju I was thoroughly bored with the game and decided that was ten bucks down the toilet. Oh well. Life goes on.

Then my two year old came into the room and said "Robot?" Hell yeah, robot! Let's do this!

I handed my little girl a second controller and we had some fun playing rocke'em sock'em robots. She's old enough to hit the buttons and say "robot," but she doesn't really know what's going on. Who cares, we were having fun, right?

Then I talked up the Jaeger customizer, and how we were going to make a purple robot for her. After we went through the simple customization process I opened up the color customizer and was told that none of my cosmetic changes would be saved until I paid three dollars for the "Jaeger Designer" feature. This crummy game was going to charge me even more money for the luxury of painting my daughter's Jaeger. I'd like to type in all caps right now, but I'm not going to.

Yuke's Co,, Ltd., the developer and publisher, wanted an extra three bucks for paint --and this wasn't special paint. We're talking any paint. Not wanting to incur the wrath of a two year old, I paid for it. The damn thing just wouldn't download. It errored out. Over and over again. So, screw you Yukes, and your lousy game. You made my kid cry.