Men in Black: Alien Crisis review (PlayStation 3)

Yet even with mildly interesting attachments, it's all very boring. Enemies move at an unhurried pace through open spaces, making it easy to spot and eliminate them. You face only about a half dozen different foes, who perform the same few actions (take cover, shoot, reposition), so repetition quickly sets in. By using attachments or spamming your scoped weapon, you can increase your score multiplier and drive your score even higher, but seeing bigger numbers pop out of downed enemies doesn't make the dull action more lively.

When you aren't shooting away willy-nilly, there are short stealth sections in which you must shoot security cameras and trap baddies in bubbles. Wait for the cone of vision to pass, shoot the camera, bubble the alien, move on. Inconsistent detection means you might get caught doing the thing you got away with moments before, but frequent checkpoints keep these setbacks from being more than mildly irritating. Car chases through (or rather, above) the streets of New York City provide some faster-paced action that, while inoffensive, is far from exciting.

Other attempts at gameplay variety are more irksome because they drag on much longer. Investigation sequences have you walking around a small area at a snail's pace, hovering your scanner reticle over anything that glows. This could have been a good place to bring in some humor or fantastical alien mythology, but save one or two interesting descriptions, the writing and dialogue here are as lifeless as elsewhere. Ditto for the conversation sections. The occasional choices you must make are neither interesting nor impactful, leaving you to wait through lengthy dialogue, desperate for a humorous morsel that never comes.

Despite this padding, you can complete the story mode in about three hours. There are timed challenges with target scores to shoot for, and you can run these split-screen with a friend or take turns competing with up to four players locally. But this is the same bland shooting action from the story mode, and the prospect of competition does little to enhance it.

All of this boredom and blandness is exacerbated by the fact that MIB: Alien Crisis frequently subjects you to loading times in excess of 30 seconds, leaving you to wonder what exactly it's working so hard on. But perhaps the most egregious offense is that the game is currently retailing for full price. Even with the included voucher for money toward a movie ticket that may or may not be redeemable in your area, this is a shockingly high price. Fortunately, it makes your decision easy: Don't buy this game.