Aeon Flux review

First off, Majesco’s movie tie-in ... isn't. This third-person action game doesn't replay events of the Aeon Flux movie. Sure, it lays a gloss of Charlize Theron in slick vinyl over everything, but at heart, it throws back instead to the old MTV cartoon series for its personality, artistic sense, and level designs.

True, Aeon’s skills and abilities are pretty cool. She leaps nimbly around with almost Spider-Man-like agility, wields various gadgets, rolls shiny globes around (it's cooler than it sounds. Think Metroid Prime or Super Monkey Ball), whups bad guys' asses with cool acrobatic moves, and even bungie jumps hundreds, sometimes thousands of feet. 

The trouble is that Aeon gives it all up a bit too readily. There's no real difference between the second level and the last one. You never earn any new skills, abilities, or weapons. You've got 'em all already. The designer (Terminal Reality, which gave us the similar "chick with guns" series BloodRayne ) does break up the action/platform gameplay with a few puzzles, those sphere-rolling sections, and some "shoot things with the turret" missions, but you’ve still seen almost everything the game is going to show you by the time you finish level three.

That’s the real problem here: there's no sense of progress. As in the original animated show, Aeon dies at the end of every level. When the next level begins, her next "life" picks up somewhere else completely - which means you’re pretty much starting over again from square one. Granted, this repetition neatly communicates the nihilistic, "our existence is pointless" tone of the original animated shorts. But that doesn’t make it especially fun to play.