For such a rich and often-told story, the game completely butchers the myth that is Beowulf.

Boiled down to its most basic aspects, “Beowulf” the game is nothing more than a “God of War” clone with a fresh coat of paint. The only problem with this is that the paint begins to chip within minutes of turning on the game.

Coinciding with the release of the film, the Xbox 360 version of the game features all the fun of killing hoards of barbarians with none of the mess.

Wait, scratch that. It features all of the mess without any of the fun.

The game is kind of violent. And by kind of violent, I mean obscenely over the top in its presentation of all things painful. In the first hour of the game, you will have successfully snapped a man in half, ripped a beast’s arm off and thrown one ugly crab monster against another equally ugly crab monster.

The game attempts to add depth to itself by including some mild role playing and strategy elements, but these seem tacked on and incredibly shallow. Your weapons degrade over time, so the player is constantly forced to find new objects of destruction. After a few times, I just got fed up and began to fight through the entire thing using nothing but my fists. One plus to this is that pretty much every time you kill a guy, Beowulf makes a grunting noise that is both sensual and amusing.

The level design also presents a major problem. On numerous occasions, the player is dropped into a poorly designed area with no idea of what they should do or where they should go. This led to large chunks of time spent wandering through ugly looking forests trying to figure out just what the hell the legendary hero should be doing next.

Later on in the game, certain objectives become insanely difficult to the point where I had to stop playing and contemplate my manhood. Through deep breathing and constant repetition of the phrase, “It’s not my fault, but the fault of the developers,” I was able to get through my crisis.

Call me crazy, but I can’t recall a passage from the poem that described how Beowulf spent the afternoon wandering aimlessly through a forest. Try all you might, it just ain’t there.

Every time you finish a level, you get some nifty concept art or a behind the scenes video featuring some mesmerizing footage of developers hard at work attempting to rip off a far better game. If this isn’t incentive to trudge through each and every agonizing level, then I don’t know what is.

One aspect of the film that the game completely neglects to cover is the copious amounts of moments of near-nudity. For a PG-13 film, I’ve never seen so many penises covered up by strategically placed blades, flames, shadows, monster hands and other assorted goodies that block the viewer’s gaze from getting an eyeful of computer-generated genitalia.

For such a rich and often-told story, the game completely butchers the myth that is Beowulf. If one goes into it without prior knowledge of the story, prepare for 10 hours of head scratching, because the game neglects to fill in a large number of plot details necessary to understand the story.

In the end, the game is nothing more than a shallow clone of “God of War.” Unless abundant amounts of gore still gives you the giggles, I suggest you skip the game and spend your time doing something productive, like thinking up of some more clever ways to strategically cover up a man’s reproductive organ.

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