Into the vault: Captain America: Super Soldier (3DS)
Though we still certainly get them from time to time, I really think the last gasp of almost always getting a licensed video game tie-in to a big movie release that wasn’t a mobile game (and some of those are pretty decent) was during the initial era of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, like shortly before Disney bought Marvel. You got games based on Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and Captain America.
This was phase one of what is easily the biggest and most successful movie franchise of certainly the last decade and yet post-Captain America, there has not been one major game released directly tied to the movies, or even the MCU really. Games like Insomniac’s Spider-Man and the upcoming Avengers game from Square Enix are based on those properties and might even incorporate some elements seen in the movies, but they aren’t really based on the MCU, just based on the character(s) themselves and are different interpretations of those characters.
It definitely used to be the case that an obviously rushed subpar video game could come out and even if it wasn’t a blockbuster, could still reliably make some extra money from kids and people who just never learn that with few exceptions, games based licensed stuff is generally bad (this has changed more recently but we also have far fewer games based on popular IP coming out on the regular). At some point, the rising average cost of even making a bad, rushed game and enough of even kids knowing tie-in games suck became too much of a factor and it seems to have been this last slate of games based on Marvel movies. They were almost all mediocre, some far worse than mediocre, and it seems like Hollywood and the game industry as a whole said seems we can’t get any more water from this well, let’s just pack it in.
Granted, one should not have high expectations of a 3DS game that is a tie-in, which is usually the lowest tier of this type of game development. Not that the 3DS wasn’t capable of some amazing games, but licensed tie-ins 99% of the time were clearly developed as quickly and cheaply as possible.
In the case of Captain America: Super Soldier for the 3DS some of it can certainly be amounted to poor budget constraints and rushed development. The game doesn’t look great, dialogue is voiced but also a large portion is just still portraits talking to each other.
But really all that would be fine if what we had was a pretty straight-forward brawler where you can throw around your shield wily nily. While you’ve got that, every other aspect of Captain America: Super Soldier is what really drags it down.
First, there’s the badly shoe-horned in stylus gameplay. A shield appears on the touch-screen section and you run the stylus up and down the screen, mostly to perform feats of strength that frankly, Captain America shouldn’t be able to pull off. Remember, the serum makes him a peak human being, it doesn’t make him superhuman, but this game still has you doing things like ripping open solid steel doors and yanking giant turrets off their mounts. But the real problem is doing this with the stylus is incredibly dull and unresponsive and just makes no sense why it’s even here except that they felt they had to add it in because it was something the 3DS could do without putting much thought to if it actually makes sense for the game.
The game is also filled with incredibly annoying stealth sections with no checkpoints where I’ve repeatedly had enemies/cameras see me outside of what is clearly their line of site (also often cheaply hidden off-screen and you just jump off a platform right into it because you had no way of knowing what was there), so if you fail even near the end you have to start all over again. Just bad design choice there.
Now when you aren’t doing annoying stealth sections or doing the terrible stylus gameplay, Captain America: Super Soldier is a more solid brawler, but even then it falls pretty flat as enemies, especially bosses, are incredibly cheap and frankly, Cap moves like an old man. He’s just surprisingly slow in not just walking (can’t run) but in just about every action he performs.
I’ve been pretty kind to other games that aren’t great but have some surprising positives to them like Tangled and Brave. There’s pretty much no positives here in Captain America: Super Soldier. It’s not just boring or average, it’s actively terrible. I’m sure at some point I’ll do a ranking of MCU video games and this will undoubtedly be near the bottom of the list. I hear the home console version is actually pretty decent for maybe we’ll check that out in the future soon. That’s all for now, see ya real soon!
