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I wish we still had horrible licensed games. The golden age of mediocre junk like Smarties Meltdown, Animorphs, and Charlie’s Angels are terrible in the best possible way: games that exist only to sell brands or modify properties that aren’t video games in the first place. As development became more expensive, these gems faded.
Of course, there are still exceptions, with smaller titles such as Paw Patrol, Peppa Pig and Crayola Scoot providing a perfectly solid experience for younger audiences, while the popularity of comic books has made triple-A productions increasingly commonplace. but this one always focus on the big names and little else. Either that, or you can expect them to take advantage of modern genres like Evil Dead and asymmetric multiplayer or Marvel’s Avengers and its misguided obsession with live-service cooperative play.
The days of smaller, lower-budget games are behind us, and there’s something bizarrely tragic about the new generation that can’t taste such things. Most of them were utter rubbish, but I’ll never forget the times my parents allowed me to dig into Tesco’s bargain bin looking for cheap games to play, as full-blown firecrackers were only reserved for birthdays and Christmas. Without this I would never have bothered with Predator: Concrete Jungle.
Developed by Eurocom, a studio responsible for the likes of 40 Winks, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, G-Force and countless other licensed tie-ins – it’s no stranger to taking existing properties and doing something unique with them . Usually it involved adapting a movie or television show, but Concrete Jungle was different. While the story and the build-up of the world were inspired by certain comics, for the most part this was a self-contained affair. One that wanted to tell its own story while furthering the Predator mythos.
Concrete Jungle is the perfect licensed game on paper. It has an obvious reverence for the history of the series, with its selection of different skins and loving references to the movies and comics that made it all this point. There’s even a phase where you fight Xenomorphs in the midst of an underground lab, alluding to this alien deathmatch when the idea of them crossing swords was still all the rage. It’s just a shame that, beneath the imaginative visuals and lavish attention to detail, there was a game that feels like shit to play.
Upon its release, Concrete Jungle received mediocre reviews from critics. They all criticized the unnecessarily complicated controls and outlandish story, while complaining about the potential it held for never taking advantage. I was a cool kid when I first played the game so was clearly charmed by the bloody violence and detailed lore, convinced Predator was a super duper deep character rather than some random alien landing on Earth to bring people alive to skin and what problem to cause. In reality, he’s an alien with a vagina that screams a lot and gets kicked in the ass by some gangsters in the opening level.
The game starts in the New Way City of the 1930s with all the stereotypes of the mafia you would expect from such a period. Everyone is a mixture of Italian and/or Irish, with the landscape stuck in a perpetual state of rainfall as the Predator hunts its worthy prey. Once the man is killed, a major riot breaks out across the city and our hero (villain?) is mortally wounded when a burning building collapses on his poor little body. Unable to escape, he decides to self-destruct his ship, razing an entire city to the ground. Nice, dude.
His fellow Predators aren’t happy about it, especially when it turns out that our titular alien survived the attack and must bear the consequences. He is taken to a hostile planet and forced to fight for his life, expected to perish in the unfolding deathmatch and give up his right to hunt. But he survives, and a hundred years later he returns to Earth and is tasked with making amends for his past mistakes. Humans managed to harvest Predator technology and transform the entire world, producing futuristic technology ranging from weapons, mechs, and a wider society that feels more Blade Runner than Goodfellas.
This all sounds pretty cool, right? That’s about it, but Concrete Jungle unfortunately does a terrible job of making it fun to play. My memory is a little fuzzy, but I vividly remember what a nightmare it was to not only control the Predator, but also have it perform basic actions in combat or exploration that shouldn’t have been so complicated. It takes blunt button combinations to perform certain moves, while the characters roaming the open city environments are so strangely relentless that even going through each mission is a nasty nightmare. Skinning people alive and killing gang members should be fun, but here I wrote down the control schedule like a kid trying to learn to play.
The enemies you fight are also tainted with harmful stereotypes. There are the gangs I mentioned rather than leaning into rather crude Irish tropes, while a more futuristic group plays a boss fight against a Voodoo man covered in paint while yelling random phrases at the players. Likewise, a strange attitude towards sex workers and similar minority groups makes Concrete Jungle feel woefully out of date. Fans will appreciate the references to companies like Weyland Yutani and other tidbits, but it’s not worth trudging through a game that just isn’t very good. Reactions to trailers online have been filled with people begging for a remaster because they are so full of nostalgia.
You don’t, and would change your mind seconds after trying this mess of a 2022 game. It could have been something special, and a Predator game that adheres to modern open world conventions is a personal dream of mine. But it’s probably never going to happen.
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