Prison Break The Conspiracy puts you in the role of Tom Paxton – an undercover cellmate who works for ‘the Company’. Whilst you’re behind bars you’ll be keeping watch over Michael Scofield and his brother Lincoln Burrows; as they plan to escape Fox River Penitentiary. The game is set during Series 1 of the popular Prison Break TV series and introduces many of the characters from it.
This title has been developed by Zootfly – who have yet to develop a large collection of Xbox 360 games, but have made a good attempt at this title. Entering prison life is never going to be simple, so you get what you expect. Some friendly faces and a lot of people out to get you, but who said it was going to be easy. You’ll find yourself having to go around this rather dull looking prison house completing errands for other cell-mates, which in-turn brings you closer to stopping Scofield and Burrows from escaping this large prison complex.
Even the guards themselves act like prisoners – showing no mercy to anyone and working with prisoners to earn some of the green stuff – money. Although money plays a small role in the game apart from buying tattoos, which in the end seems rather pointless – other than earning an achievement for having a tattoo on all 6 sections of your body.
This game heavily relies on laying low and using stealth in almost every mission you’re sent on. This consequently becomes repetitively boring and after 2 hours of play time you’ll be begging for control over ‘T-Bag’ or even ‘Sucre’. Sadly this doesn’t happen, as the only playable character is Paxton – who has no relevance to the TV series before you wonder where he came from. This will be disappointing to fans of the TV series, as they most likely bought the game to play as their favourite characters from Prison Break Series 1. However there is a local ‘Versus’ multiplayer mode – that allows you to play as some of the characters from the series in a simple-to-win punch-up fight.
The storyline is interesting and unique to say the most. You play through Series 1 from a different perspective, which also reveals some hidden areas that weren’t shown in the TV series. These were probably just ideas that were thrown into the works to make it more interesting than the simple aim of stopping Michael and his brother Lincoln from escaping Fox River Penitentiary. In most missions you can expect fetch based quests – one example of this is picking the lock to a safe in order to return your well-earned $500 you won from a ‘fair and square’ fight.
During your prison life you won’t be confined to your cell, but you’ll actually have some freedom within most areas of the penitentiary. The game offers most of this freedom in the yard – where you can improve your fighting abilities weight-lifting and throwing punches into a punch bag. Although there is no visible change during fighting, except a slight change in the damage dealt per hit. ‘Underground Fight’ is the only place you can go to earn some extra cash to buy a handsome collection of tattoos varying from dragons to tribal designs. An opponent can be selected, which all have varying money rewards depending on the type of opponent – these vary in damage and speed and the most challenging opponent will bring you an extra $200 to put towards earning $5000 for another achievement.
The unintelligent AI seem too easy to deal with – running in front of them and then quickly hammering down A to go through the door to avoid detection, seems a tad bit unrealistic and definitely not a representation of the TV series. Whilst you roam around you’ll find the entire out that the building is scattered around with guards and delivery men – who very often fail to see you, despite running straight in front of them. This leads to the AI being very unpredictable at times, roaming around the prison during the gloomy night, whilst spotlights scan the area surrounding you is another example of this not-so intelligent AI you’re faced with. By running into this spotlight you won’t get an instant detection instead a red arrow on the top of your HUD telling you that you’ve been spotted. Now I’m pretty sure that in a prison as tough as this one that you’re not going to get a simple; what was that? Instead you’re bound to receive a bullet to the head or chest. Your cell mates may seem tough, but the guards seem to be very lenient in their duties.
That’s pretty much all there is to tell about Prison Break The Conspiracy, which has been a slight let down for Prison Break fans like me; as I would of loved to play the role of the intelligent Scofield or the tough looking Burrows. Paxton seems to possess both of these qualities, but fails to deliver as much enjoyment as you would get from playing with some of the TV characters. If you enjoy prison based games and stealth based missions, then this game may very well be for you.
Score – 6/10
Jamie Tarren 