If we were to formulate a list of hot properties for 2005, ID4 probably wouldn't make the cut. It's been almost 10 years since the charmingly insouciant Will Smith--fresh from the Fresh Prince--delivered the crowd-pleasing line "Welcome to Earth," before knuckle-dusting a hapless extraterrestrial. Since then, Smith has found other venues for his sneaker and sound system product placement, and everyone but Jeff Goldblum has forgotten about ID4. Until now. Independence Day mobile is a poor game, even by V Cast standards.
The game is set in the final seconds of the final scene of the film, after which a virus has been uploaded to the alien mother ship, causing its protective shields and fighters to malfunction. As a nameless fighter pilot, you have only to destroy some blaster turrets, and stick it to the big mamma with your cruise missiles. After roughly a minute of gameplay, you'll have "saved the world." Oh, but wait! You've only saved the gray skyscrapers of Los Angeles. In an anticlimactic move, you'll next have to save the identical gray skyscrapers in Paris, France! Oh man, are Charles de Gaulle and the Parisian architectural commission going to be peeved when they see this. And apart from the decent plane model, the game looks like bland, uninteresting garbage--not even the kind that might be worth rooting around in under the cover of darkness.
This is already a weak concept for a game, but it's made even worse by overly arcadelike flight physics. Nothing can stop your plane. You can try crashing into stuff, taking excessive amounts of gunfire, and flying upside down for minutes at a time. You're on fire out there. If you tilt your plane so that its wings are completely perpendicular to the ground, you'll simply begin to slowly circle the city.
Perhaps the silliest part of the game is its soundtrack, which is full of aggressive house music. If you've seen Mars Attacks!, you know the true alien-trouncing power of bad music, so perhaps this serves a purpose. Unfortunately, bad music is also offensive to humans, such as the ones who've just paid $9.99 on their LG VX8000s for the pleasure of listening to it.
Independence Day is a terrible game based on the last few seconds of a movie that came out a decade ago. Were all the good licenses gone? Couldn't Will Smith at least make an appearance? Can someone make the room stop spinning? The answers to these questions are, in order: yes, no, and no. Avoid this game, and enjoy your US-minted greenbacks--it's the patriotic thing to do.
