Code of Honor: The French Foreign Legion review (PC)

It’s difficult to know how to fairly criticise games like Code of Honour: The French Foreign Legion that sell for just £5. Just for the sake of accuracy it’s really ‘Honor’ but I refuse to acknowledge annoying Americanisms.

The price alone makes it immediately evident that this isn’t going to be the next Call of Duty 4 or Crysis, so to compare it to games of that level would be a little harsh.

Even taken entirely on its own merits though, Code of Honour is still pretty bad. It does have some decidedly positive points, and if it wasn’t for these the game would be crushingly dreadful, but they only serve to raise it to mediocrity at best.

The most important positive point to make is that the game is at least entertaining. I played the whole thing through in one sitting (yes, it’s that short) and although at several points I met with hideous frustration, I wasn’t ever truly bored.

In a perverse way, a lot of the things that are wrong with the game actually added to the entertainment value.

Take the story, for instance. The entire narrative is presented as text on the loading screens for each level. It’s rather basic, and at times shamelessly implausible, but the real amusement is in the translation.

You wouldn’t think it’d be too difficult to have a native English speaker read over the translation just to make sure it sounded ok, but it doesn’t seem like this ever happened.

The result is passages that are oozing with gung-ho militarism, but are, at the same time, unbearably twee in their phraseology. To an inveterate pedant like me, this was pretty irritating, but at least it made me laugh.

Even funnier was the voice acting. Not only was the acting itself hilariously bad (done in an exaggeratedly dramatic voice, yet curiously devoid of any urgency or emotion) but every single line was a horrible cliché.

Attentive readers may have noticed that our esteemed editor has a disturbing love of 80s action movies. (damn right! – oiled Ed) Well, almost everything that’s said in the game could have come directly from one of them. The dialogue has the same bloated self importance of the average ‘80s action script, but without any of the wit.

A few tasteless one-liners as you cheerfully despatch the bad guys would have improved the game no end. Instead, in a weird fit of schizophrenia your character merely makes trite, tough-guy observations entirely to himself, such as “I’m in trouble again – I was born to get in trouble!” I laughed, but the only alternative was retching.

For all that, the story is largely an irrelevance. Code of Honour is really just an old-style FPS that needs no excuse to run about, blowing away evil foreigners. In this it actually does ok. The weapons are varied and satisfying, with your enemies emitting hilarious, high-pitched squeals when you hit them, which at least serves to amuse.

There also appears to be an occasional physics glitch that causes some enemies you shoot to react more like they’ve been hit by a grenade. It has no effect on the gameplay, but it can be enjoyable to watch a man you’ve shot once in the chest fly violently sideways at a ninety-degree angle and collide with a wall.

Annoyingly the effect that the scenery has on gameplay is rather unpredictable. The AI seems entirely unaware of its existence, so the enemies will gleefully fire in your direction regardless of whether they could really see you, and even if it means firing point blank into a wall.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to tell which parts of the scenery are more solid than others, so there will be times when you’re shot through a ‘solid’ brick wall, and others when a few twigs are enough to stave off a hail of Kalashnikov rounds (like that bit in Commando where bullets are deflected away from Arnold by rose bushes – 80s action Ed).

These things do not happen enough to make the game unplayable though, and on the whole the actual gameplay itself is relatively fun.

The graphics are exactly what you should expect from a £5 game. They aren’t bad so much as they’re very dated. Five or six years ago this game would have looked fantastic, which should give some idea of the graphical level it’s working at. As long as you aren’t expecting too much, they’re good enough, especially if you have an ancient system.

It’s a shame, but Code of Honour’s best points are fairly abstract and have no effect on gameplay. I liked the setting for example and, although Far Cry 2 will be coming out shortly with a similar one, there still aren’t many games set in Africa. This certainly made a nice change from shooting at Russians, Arabs or the Wehrmacht.

Despite the very poor voice acting for the main character (who, by the way, has a very American accent for a Parisian) the enemies’ voices are an almost unnoticed gem.

They call to each other in French, as soldiers from the Ivory Coast would, and although there has been a tendency over the last few years for more games to have the enemies speak the correct language (rather than English), it was still unexpected and impressive to see that attention to detail in a budget title.

Finally, I rather liked the fact that the protagonist is French. All too often (almost always) we play FPS games as a British or American soldier, so it’s very nice to see other nationalities getting the occasional look-in.

So is Code of Honour a good game? Well no, I can’t go quite that far, but what I will say is that it’s better than you’d expect from the price tag. It’s fun, amusing (however unintentionally) and a lot more original than many games that cost six times as much. Balanced against this is the fact that it’s short, dated and unsophisticated.

It does not stand even the barest comparison with the current generation of top-spec, top-price FPS titles, but it shouldn’t have to either. Don’t buy this instead of one of them – buy it instead of a bad movie.

Code of Honour will provide about five or six hours of mindless entertainment for a fiver, whereas a DVD of a bad film will give you two hours for £15 (I got McBain for two quid, remember – 80s action Ed). That’s the real comparison that should be made with a game like this, and in that situation I think Code of Honour gives reasonable value for money.

4.5/10

Steven Rees