Men In Black (Arcade)
The odd thing about the 2021 Men in Black arcade game isn’t that it avoids tying in directly to the series of sci-fi films, but that a company like Sega would produce a light gun game that plays in the way it does. Sega has been making arcade games for almost as long as video games have been available to the public and they have many arcade light gun shooters under their belt like the House of the Dead and Virtua Cop franchises, so they have a good understanding of what works within the format. Men In Black though avoids some common sense ideas and ends up suffering for it, but there is a possible culprit in this missed mark: tickets.
Men In Black is a first person shooter with gun controllers you aim at the screen and fire, but depending on the arcade you head to, the arcade cabinet may be set up either as a point-based affair where you try to get a high score or a way to earn tickets to redeem for prizes. These two goals seem like they would allow for similar designs to be effective, both focus on doing as well as you can for some form of payout, but Men in Black takes an odd approach that makes it fail in both regards, partly because it is too easy to rack up points or tickets and not too entertaining to do so during the process. In Men In Black you play as the newly invented agents Agent N and Agent V as they travel across the planet to stop alien attacks. When you arrive at a location, the game will have a group of humanoid aliens run out towards you and start firing their own guns while you try to gun them down in turn, but even though your characters might flinch from a hit, they’re not in danger. There is no health bar, and if you’re too slow in shooting down the aliens you’ll either keep moving along automatically or if you’re playing solo then the other agent will gun the rest down to give the illusion that you dispatched with the threat effectively.
Instead, failure can seemingly only arise in one area, that being during the stage’s boss battle. The skirmishes with the regular aliens go by surprisingly quickly, the game bragging about its 90 second levels in its advertising even though it means that already low substance shootouts end up going by all too quickly, but the bosses do have a unique edge. Rather than being worried about your own safety while fighting these dangers from outer space, the boss aliens must be beat within a time limit or else they will escape, and since the goal of the Men In Black agency is suppression of extraterrestrial threats, this is where you can finally fail. The boss alien will have points on their body to shoot indicated by targets to deal higher damage but firing on other parts will still reduce their health bar, and while these fights usually aren’t too difficult, it does still demand some attention and aim compared to the rest of the experience. If one escapes that is the end of your current credit even though the game will allow you to continue playing after if you put in more, but the difficulty level does mean you can often go through many levels before a boss finally hits on the right strength or speed to necessitate a continue so you can rack up a lot of points or tickets with persistence rather than skill.
The fact danger is rarely present does weaken the normal play quite a bit, making some of the lead up to the boss battles almost feel like filler. The alien gunmen you fight on the way to the boss come in small squads and each member will be highlighted in an outline that indicates their value. Big guys like the fez wearing Fixers are highlighted in red while the more standard sized foes like the Reptilians and Finigans will be wreathed in yellow, making it easy to quickly identify the high value target, shoot them down, and then move onto the less valuable ones. The more durable foes at least demand more time to kill and your partner, be they human or AI, might shoot down a good deal of the lower value targets while you dispense with the big guy, but the game’s pace also means you’ll be zipping along too quickly to worry too much about that since the game throws too few foes at you at a time to really make such target prioritization matter that much. Levels do include a brief swarm of many flying low value targets to at least break you from the usual strategy of blasting down the big guy for a few seconds and there is usually a weapon pick-up somewhere along the way to grab, but these have their own problems as well.
The default weapon is the Tri-Barrel Plasma Gun, an automatic weapon with no need to reload and there’s never anything you shouldn’t shoot so you can mindlessly fire as much as you like. Briefcases pop up in stages with different weapons though that you’ll be able to use for the rest of that level, and one issue with them is a good deal of them feel just like the Tri-Barrel Plasma Gun. A new gun likely still fires rapidly, foes seem to take just as long to die, and the visuals barely change, so even if you’re told you’re wielding something new, it hardly feels like it. There are a few guns that do change things a touch, some packing a slow but powerful shot that you can see and feel the changes in power and ability. These at least ask you to wait and fire since the game’s breakneck pace means a slow and strong weapon can miss its opportunities if you’re careless, but they appear less than the barely noticeable upgrades so unfortunately a level’s usual style of play won’t feel too different from any others.
The ability to continue playing quite easily also rubs up against one unusual factor of this game, and it’s that the levels you encounter aren’t set in stone. Men In Black mixes together its weapons, bosses, enemies, and levels in different arrangements as you continue playing, not taking an effort to ensure a revisit is wholly unique but still trying to get more variety out of a limited set of content. There are four boss types, one being the recognizable roach alien from the first Men In Black film, and while the levels consist of places like a subway, a Moroccan bazaar, and the Men In Black headquarters. Even the mild variety in how you might go through them doesn’t assuage how repetitive it becomes to see the same level again in such a short time though. Since your targets are usually going to be the alien gunmen who run forward and then stand in place their positioning is often not interesting enough no matter the location, but at least this mild shuffling can lead to the bosses feeling a bit different, some moving through the environment more than others. The remixing is probably preferable than just replaying the same stage set over and over, but it did likely lead to the feeling that much of the game isn’t made with much thought, Men In Black not even comparing favorably to a shooting gallery since those at least try to place targets in tricky locations. However, the low difficulty does mean it’s not too demanding, so you can mindlessly shoot down aliens for a bit without feeling frustrated and if you are playing for tickets, you’ll get a good handful before you go even though it wasn’t that interesting to get them.
One nice touch though is after clearing a level and seeing the results screen, the game plays into the Men In Black series’s famous neuralyzer that wipes the memories of witnesses of the extraterrestrial activity the government agency is trying to cover up. The agents will blank the memories of nearby citizens and during the results screen you’ll hear them concoct some cover story for why the area is in disarray or why the people have lapses in their memory, and there are a few fairly funny justifications and a wide enough variety that there’s at least something fresh to find after the levels quickly start repeating the same set-ups and enemies. A few are blatant advertisements for other Sega arcade games or ploys to keep you playing longer and only sometimes are they effectively couched in humor, but it at least gives the game an ounce of character when the two agents usually keep quiet.
THE VERDICT: The Men In Black arcade game struggles to realize its idea of being focused on scoring points or tickets as it can’t quite find a spot between shooting gallery and light gun action game that works. Alien gunmen show up to shoot at you but pose no threat and aren’t positioned in interesting ways, the weapon pick-ups are often barely different from your normal weapon, and the small amount of content being remixed doesn’t breathe new life into it. The bosses are at least more interesting because you need to defeat them quickly and the game’s simplicity means you can get fairly far before you actually lose, but it’s not a very exciting shooter and its rewards feel a bit hollow for it.
And so, I give Men In Black for arcade machines…
A BAD rating. If Men In Black had flubbed the bosses then it would really lack much of anything worth seeing, but at least those all too brisk 90 second levels shove you towards the boss fights faster than other light gun games might and you can experience the segment where there’s some actual risk involved. Aiming at the targets is usually not too hard but when the boss is a flightier or tougher creature you can end up not being quick enough to take them out and face a failure, and in a game where it can sometimes feel like you’re all too easily proceeding from level to level, having that danger does inject a brief burst of life into an otherwise bland play session. Considering the game is offering the tangible reward of tickets in one of its variations it is surprising the alien gunmen aren’t made properly dangerous since it would be a fine way to deny players more of what they’re aiming for, but whether you play that version or the point variant it still doesn’t make actually earning either reward that great because the normal enemies are rarely interesting targets and there’s not enough thought in where you aim and fire. Making the gunmen behave differently even if they didn’t pose a threat could at least lean the game more towards a gussied up alien-themed shooting gallery, but the remixing of level elements likely lead to them being limited since it’s hard to have aliens behave in interesting ways when sometimes they’re crammed in a small Moroccan house or subway car compared to the more open spaces of the MIB HQ. Rather than focusing on the illusion of infinite replayability, having a few level variants that have their order scrambled could give off a similar illusion or you could just make replays more about figuring out the best way to earn the most points. Instead Men In Black feels sloppily put together and doesn’t commit to strong ideas, leaving it a game that goes by too quick and yet still lasts too long because failure feels unusually rare.
Usually these reviews are from the perspective of a player and whether or not they should play a game, but I think for the Men In Black arcade game I’d like to caution arcade owners against it as well. On a surface level it looks like just another light gun shooter and many of those are generically enjoyable without even needing to try too hard, but Men In Black squanders its recognizable branding on an odd experiment in trying to turn such shooters into a ticket-focused experience. Rather than playing into the strengths of light gun games or games that reward tickets though, it feels trapped between them, shaving off elements from each so that players will likely earn too many tickets for the tastes of an arcade owner or find the point-focused variant too bland because it’s too easy to just keep playing and earn a high score through mere survival. For a passerby who plays a fraction of it, Men In Black might seem bland but not too offensive, but in a market as saturated as the light gun shooter, it’s hard to justify picking this over any other, especially since there are more relevant franchises and even better alien shooters that will likely please players a good deal more.