It’s pretty sad you don’t even need to read any reviews to know this game is bad. It’s a movie tie in, made as a marketing vehicle for Marvel’s Thor movie, a movie not particularly highly rated at that. It’s everything you’d expect from a movie tie in. It’s glitch filled – I actually took the disc out thinking it was dirty when I first loaded the game and saw the stuttering frame rate. It’s derivative; It’s an action brawler, trying to be the next Arkham Asylum but failing miserably; and it’s not fun; the camera, the controls, the hit detection, the repetitiveness. If I really wanted to, I could totally rip into it, tear the developers a new one with funny comments on how bad it is, and so on.

But you know what? This time I’m not going to. Because, I’ve worked on worse games. I worked on Dukes of Hazard: Return of the General Lee, Hellboy: The Science of Evil, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. All franchise or movie tie in games, all made on incredibly short timeframes and incredibly small budgets.

Someone like me, over at Sega, busted their guts to make this game. There is someone out there who worked from 8 in the morning to 12 at night writing code to get the shadows and glare to work like it does in the movies. There is an animator who spent weekends weighting the character models so Thor’s arm wouldn’t clip through his face when he threw his hammer. There are environment artists who worked through their children’s birthdays to build levels which were cut at the last moment. There are testers who spent ungodly hours sitting around, waiting for builds, finding and reporting bugs which, due to time and budget constraints, couldn’t be fixed.

I know there are many people out there who think making games are easy, and the bad games are just the result of lazy developers and greedy publishers. This is, putting it mildly, utter bullshit. In 8 years of working in games, I’ve not met one person unwilling to put the same level of energy or effort into a game like Thor compared to a game like Halo. Simply put, if they were lazy, they’d be out of a job, but moreover, making a game, critically successful or not, is something to be damn proud of.

People hear about how much a game costs, and think it’s a fortune. And yes, to you, my reader, who statistics show is a 22 year old male who’s just finished college; $10 million is a lot of money to make a game based on a franchise, isn’t it? Should be easy – don’t have to think of costumes and locations and story and such, right?

But let’s break that down – firstly, that’s $10 Million over the 3 major consoles – Wii, Xbox and PS3. Now we’re down to $3 Million per platform, or ‘sku’ as it’s known. Secondly, you’ve got roughly 10 months to develop a movie tie-in, so that’s now a budget of $300,000 per month per sku. The average wage of a developer is $70,000, so on average you have 5 people per sku on the project from kick off to gold. Of course, this waxes and wanes throughout the production cycle, but this is how you work things out. Now that $10 million isn’t looking like very much, is it?

Often, this money comes out of the films marketing budget. This means the marketing people have a greater stake in how your came comes out. Marketing always has a say in how games are made, but the people at Microsoft Marketing have much more realistic grasp on how games are made compared to those at Fox Pictures, for example.

Many people think you automatically have the story and characters for use when making a movie tie-in, and essentially all a developer needs to do is make a fun game out of it. But Thor isn’t based on the plot of the movie; it’s a whole new story. Transformers didn’t even have a story until after principle filming had completed – by which time the game was nearly beta!

There are new locations and new enemies and new characters. All of this has to be designed, created, and approved by the rights holder – in Thor’s case, Marvel – as well as the movie rights holder, as well as the game publisher. So, not only are you making a whole game with a new story from scratch, you’ve also got many fingers in the pie, something non-movie based games don’t have. You can bet only people who had to approve Masterchief’s armour were the Bungie creative directors.

If a studio is really lucky, they might get access to the film’s assets. That is, the 3D assets for props or environments, access to the sound library, motion capture data, and so on. But even if they do have this, the resolution of film is so much higher than a video game console can handle. So, in addition to making props and characters and items for any level not in the movie, these assets must be optimised for the game. Artists will chop out verts, re-skin and re-texture to reduce the size of the original assets, which then need to go through the approval process.

Any changes to the movie affect the game, too. In Transformers, Bumblebee’s headlights changed in the movie, so we had to adjust them on the game model. Then they changed a second time. Sure, it’s only a days’ work, but that’s two days wasted when you need to be doing other things. And if it’s something major, like a major character is cut from the movie but is already in your game, you need to make justification for this. The most common solution is adding a cutscene, my “favourite” solution to hear from an external producer.

Adding a cutscene isn’t as easy as doing it for a movie. For a movie, you call your actors together, go on-site, and reshoot. For a game, it takes an environmental artist, a prop artist, an animator or two, and a programmer to put it together. Remember how before I said there is an average of 5 people per month on a project? Well, these people have tasks they need to do to get the game done, and now because of changes of the film which are completely out of their control, they have to find time to do this extra stuff as well as their usual tasks.

Another issue is sound. For the cutscene example above, you’ll need all the actors to come back in and re-record. Actors cost lots of money, and moreover they’re often unavailable. That’s why often in movie tie-ins it sounds “phoned in”. Often it is. Even if it’s in an actor’s contract they need to be available for VO work, they’re tired after doing 8 months of filming and a 2 months press junket. Then there are the on screen actors who look good but can’t act their way out of a paper bag, and that becomes embarrassingly obvious when you hear them do VO.

Then there are the executive producers. Some of these people are wonderfully fantastic and fully understand the issues and pressures you’re under. From personal experience, it’s the Western game studios – your Activision and Microsoft people, who are most accommodating. However, when they’re not reasonable, or worse, think they’re creative, that’s when real problems arise. They may know about making games in general if you’re lucky, but they don’t know about your studio and your game in particular.

If you’re unlucky, they’re straight out of business school and have no clue about production cycles. They look at spreadsheets, and calculate time based on hours in a day, not the way people actually work and live their lives. These are the people who come in and say “the movie has major stars that are not in the game… put them in the game” or “change the entire structure of that platforming minigame” a week before your beta date, even after every other person in both the studio and the publishing company has told them these are very bad ideas. They make calls based on creative whims or market demands with little concern of how to achieve them, but demand them to be done simply because they’re the boss.

Conclusion:
These are just some of the issues I’ve faced working on movie tie in games, and I know for a fact the guys behind Thor would have had similar experiences. I can tell as I play through the game. I nod sagely when I see an enemy glitch out. I sigh the sigh of one who’s been there, done that when Thor’s cape stretches off to infinity. I’ve butted heads against the same types of producers who think they’re creative and demand changes at the last minute as is obvious with Thor. I’ve waited until 2 am for a build which is broken because of an art change. I understand what they went through to get this game out and that’s why I can’t be harsh on the game.

Most importantly, I understand why they do it. Partly it’s because you have to. You have a job, and it needs to be done, and you do so to the best of your ability under the circumstances. Partly it’s the hope your next project will have a vision you can sink your teeth into, and a budget which supports your expansive or innovative ideas.

But mostly it’s because, no matter what the critics score it, no matter what disparaging remarks commentators on web forums say, there will always be people out there who will enjoy the game, no matter what, simply because it is a tie-in. And because it’s Thor, the chance for that fan to inhabit their favourite character in their favourite worlds, as flawed as it may be, has brought joy for just a little moment. Because as a game developer, there’s no greater justification for doing what you do than when you get an email or letter or forum post from someone on the other side of the world that reads “I love this game. Thank you.”

Pros:
It’s Thor! You’re a damn Norse God throwing around a big fuckoff hammer.
Great environment art.
Great character and enemy art.

Cons:
It’s a typical movie tie-in game.
Poor, glitchy combat controls.
Glitchy camera.
Repetitive gameplay.
Odd animation issues.

45/100