G.I. Joe: Operation Blackout

My first reaction to Operation Blackout was genuine curiosity. G.I. Joe hadn't touched consoles since the forgettable 2009 movie tie-in, so an original campaign letting you play both factions across 17 missions sounded like exactly the kind of licensed revival worth paying attention to. The setup works on paper: Cobra seizes control of a global satellite network, scatters the Joes across the planet, and the story bounces between both sides mission by mission. Comic-panel cutscenes sell the Saturday-morning tone well, the voice work is solid, and fan-favorite characters like Snake Eyes, Storm Shadow, Scarlett, Duke, Baroness, Destro, and Zartan are all present and accounted for. For the first two or three missions, that novelty carries real weight. Then the cracks open up and they don't close. The third-person shooting, which is frankly the only thing that matters in a game like this, feels weightless. Bullets register without impact, the auto-aim snaps to wrong targets, and turning it off doesn't help because manual aiming is equally imprecise. The melee mechanic exists in theory, but landing a clean hit with Storm Shadow's katana in practice is a lottery. Each of the 12 characters has a class-based special ability tied to a cooldown timer, and the animations look good, but most abilities are easy for enemies to simply run away from. The solo AI companion is close to useless, making single-player a noticeably lonelier slog than the developers probably intended. Boss encounters, which should be highlights against icons like Cobra Commander or Zartan, mostly reduce to bullet-sponge attrition from long range while dodging robot swarms. Mission structure compounds the problem. The campaign leans hard on wave defense objectives: reach a point, hold it against endless identical grunts, wait for a timer or a trigger, move on. Occasional vehicle sections break the rhythm and are genuinely more fun, but they appear rarely. Enemy variety is thin throughout, and the open maps, while spacious enough for co-op gunfights, highlight the absence of any real cover system. Collectibles, weapon skins, alternate character outfits, and post-completion gameplay modifiers give the completionist crowd reasons to revisit levels, and local split-screen co-op does smooth over the roughest edges when you have a couch partner willing to share the frustration. Four local PvP modes (Capture the Flag, King of the Hill, Assault, Deathmatch Arena) round out the package, though the maps feel oversized for the player counts involved. There is no online multiplayer of any kind, which in 2020 was already an odd call and feels even more limiting now. What this game does genuinely well is atmosphere. The cel-shaded, comic-inspired art style fits the franchise's campy DNA. The story, while not complex, is exactly as over-the-top as a G.I. Joe story should be. The developers clearly had affection for the source material, and that affection shows in the character roster and the little franchise details scattered throughout. It just didn't translate into a shooting game with enough mechanical depth to compete against anything in its genre tier. If the IP means nothing to you, there is little reason to choose this over better third-person shooters available on PC. If you grew up with the cartoon and the action figures, the fan service is real and you might find enough here to finish the campaign once. Just go in with realistic expectations about the shooting itself.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on G.I. Joe: Operation Blackout.