I play a lot of bad games. Why isn't important -- I know a lot about them. Bad video games are almost always developed with the following two requirements:

1) Cheap as hell to develop; and
2) Needs exactly one reason for anyone to be interested in buying it.

Basing a game on an existing franchise gets you halfway to both of these, by exploiting existing lore and assets, and by exploiting an existing fanbase. But usually, a bad video game needs to push this formula further by cutting development corners, while also doing something to pique the interest of that fanbase.

In rare cases, this could be a single facet of the gameplay that actually works well. More frequently, it's creating some original story within the franchise, given a very loose definition of the word "original." But, in the case of a movie tie-in, this hook is simply the fact that it is associated with a film that is coming out at the same time; a film that has its own massive marketing machine, which the game can piggyback onto. Thus, the movie tie-in game has absolutely no reason to apply any effort beyond being playable, and purchasable.

By those standards, Tron: Evolution lives up to its expectations.

Evolution is written as a prequel to Legacy, despite a completely nonsensical timeline between the films and the game. In theory, this gave Evolution some liberty to explore new plot points, foreign to the films; but in practice, it makes the same mistakes as the Star Wars prequel trilogy, where all it tries to do is explain the events leading up to Legacy. The game's protagonist is a program named Anon, and true to his namesake, he has no voice or personality -- all he does is follow Olivia Wilde around. Evolution's plot covers the same backstory that, in Legacy, The Dude explains in about three minutes.

The front-heavy cutscenes, while intensely uninteresting from a narrative perspective, could at least have afforded to be flashy and vivid. But the lavish production values of the film simply weren't applied to the game. Cutscene events are flat and dull, and the character models of Quorra, Flynn, et al appear barely reminiscent of their actors. This is the first game in a long time where I ended up skipping many of the cutscenes outright.

This dismal storytelling could be forgiven if the gameplay was good, but I struggle to describe Evolution's formula as anything more than inadequate. There are three kinds of gameplay mechanics: Prince of Persia-style platforming, button-mashy combat, and vehicle segments; and each one is, on the whole, not good.

The platforming is somewhat reminiscent of Prince of Persia 2008, in that Anon does a lot of leaping across large gaps, and running between parallel walls; a primary difference being that Evolution's controls are shoddy. The control scheme actually borrows more from Assassin's Creed: you hold the right trigger to run, and most acrobatic moves are triggered simply by running at something. Of course, this means that they're frequently triggered by accident, or alternately, that they fail to occur because of a glitch in the level collision. The camera also does its best to kill you by sometimes moving itself automatically, causing your perfectly-lined-up jump to end up going in completely the wrong direction. The coup de grace to all this is that the platforming level design is endlessly repetitive, since, unlike Prince of Persia, there is no effort to distinguish one area of the game from another. Every platforming segment looks and plays the same.

As for combat, Anon can throw his identity disc as a projectile weapon, has a short-range melee punch, and can mix in some special attacks with different powers depending on the currently-equipped disc type. Fighting is also somewhat acrobatic, as you can blend running and jumping with disc-throwing and other moves. There are glimpses of a cool combat engine here, but as with the platforming, the controls and camera simply aren't good enough to support it. And Evolution's combat segments are even more repetitive than the platforming is: inbetween platform segments, you'll run into a room (sometimes populated by civilian programs, which will immediately flee), then a wave of bad guys will come out, and once you kill them, another wave, and then another, and usually a fourth wave before you can finally move on to the next part of the platform-combat-platform-combat pattern.

I also want to rant quickly about an obvious design flaw in the combat: when most enemies also have discs to throw at you (note: discs are homing), and these discs can do heavy damage to you, and the dodging/evasion control simply doesn't allow you to move in the way that you'd like (such as, toward something that can heal you), some encounters can become extremely frustrating. You can go from full health to dead in a split second simply because all of the enemies threw their discs at you at once. Then you get to start the fight again from the first wave!

Finally, the vehicle segments were clearly included only to put a bullet point on the back of the box. The light-cycle levels can't help but disappoint you, as, rather than engage in a TRON-style grid battle, you're just trying to race along a linear track and avoid obstacles at high speed. Faring only marginally better are the tank levels, where you hop into an extremely slow tank, and fire on enemies (mostly, other tanks) until they die. It's nice that these levels break up the absolute tedium of the alternating platforming and combat segments, but they are themselves astonishingly boring.

There's also an upgrade system that I've forgotten to mention, because it's all but irrelevant in the game itself. You level up and gain upgrade points (megabytes) from killing dudes, and you can use these at upgrade stations for ... hmm. There are dozens of upgrades available, but almost all of them are for multiplayer only. Tron: Evolution has some competitive multiplayer modes, which I absolutely don't care about, but which apparently share your character profile from the single-player mode; and you can buy new abilities and attributes using your level-up points from either. But the only upgrades that apply to the single-player at all are slightly increased health, slightly increased special-attack energy, and slightly increased rates of regeneration on both of those.

Even the soundtrack is lackluster: while Legacy's Daft Punk score is thrilling and evocative of the franchise, Evolution's soundtrack is mostly a cheap knock-off of it. The story is throwaway and the gameplay is barely playable. Granted, it is playable, which does put it ahead of many other movie tie-in games. But that's really the best I can say for it.

Better than: Jumper: Griffin's Story
Not as good as: Tron 2.0 (granted, my experience with 2.0 wasn't great either)
Most expensive part of the game: almost definitely Olivia Wilde's voice work, which is baffling because the movie's bubbly and adorable Quorra has been transformed in the game into a gruff and businesslike plot device

Progress: Finished on Normal

Rating: Bad