If you haven’t read the Bourne trilogy or seen the movies, do yourself a huge favour and check them out. That is, if you like action movies with character development or spy thriller books. Both film and literary versions are great for different reasons, and now Robert Ludlum’s legacy lives on in game form with Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Conspiracy.

If you have seen the movies or read the books you already know the game’s premise. You play the role of Jason Bourne, a government trained assassin who suffers amnesia after an unsuccessful mission. You quickly realise you have an innate ability to use almost any weapon known to man, but better than this – you’re a weapon yourself.

It’s hard to fathom why the Bourne trilogy didn’t become a game earlier – game writers have been using variants on the “amnesiac ultimate weapon” for years now. Still, it has become a game – and what a game.

The hand-to-hand combat in TBC is the real star – most of the game revolves around watching your opponents crumple into uncomfortable messes after you slam them into a variety of nearby objects.

You beat enemies up with two attack buttons, one block and a special or takedown button. By chaining together combos and successfully hitting your opponents you will build up adrenaline, which you can use to takedown up to three opponents in one move – the special “win” button.

The takedown button helps convey the urgency of the game – you’ll typically use your adrenaline up as soon as possible to make sure you don’t stop for too long. Using them makes Jason do a sweet finishing move as well – he’ll slam your enemy into a door, through a window or, in the recreation of a scene from The Bourne Identity, grab a pen and stab it into your enemy.

The takedowns carry over into the shooting part of the game as well. Headshots and kills when you shoot enemies give you more adrenaline – the way most of the levels work you can either use your takedown to shoot and kill three enemies straight up or you can save it for some hand-to-hand combat if you think you can shoot well enough yourself.

A warning though – if you’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto IV and it’s friendly auto-aim function, be prepared to relearn how to shoot all over again. When I first equipped a gun in TBC I couldn’t hit an enemy if he was standing next to me. By the end of the game almost every shot as a headshot again – back to my usual form.[Wouldn’t that be losing a huge margin then? – Kreese]

There’s one more section to The Bourne Conspiracy – one level features a car chase scene through the streets of Paris. This is essentially the most underwhelming part of the entire game, and while the idea is great the execution is weak. The car handles like a tank on ice skates, there’s no punishment for crashing and you don’t have any choice in the path your car takes. If there is a TBC 2, let’s hope cars don’t feature at all.

Bourne won’t be for everyone however. Littering the game are quick time events (QTE) – moments in the game where instead of simply watching a cut-scene you also find yourself in a Simon-Says type game, pressing buttons as they flash up on screen.

Some people refuse to play a game which uses QTEs – apart from those who are simply not coordinated enough to do them successfully; others claim it detracts from the cut scenes. If the game does them correctly I think they’re fine – Resident Evil 4 featured them for example – but consider this your warning.

When I finished TBC I found myself somewhat surprised. I completed a fight with a particularly nasty assassin when all of a sudden I received a heap of achievements. I waited for the cut-scene to play before checking them out, but by the end of the video I knew what they were.

The Bourne Conspiracy is a short game. Despite being titled “The Bourne Conspiracy” it really only covers off on The Bourne Identity. The story is fleshed out through flashbacks of assassinations Jason remembers on occasion and yet it still ends too quickly for my liking – it’s about eight hours long. You can replay boss battles and try higher difficulties but… I wanted more of the actual story.

Nevertheless, The Bourne Conspiracy is the dark horse of 2008 – we’ve covered the game’s progress a couple of times here at GameArena but it still managed to slip through the cracks coming out. If you don’t mind quick time events (or you like them, you freak) and you want a hard hitting action game, get your strangling hands of mass destruction onto this.