We were secretly hoping that Matt Damon would clobber us with a rolled-up magazine. What better way to unveil the first in a series of games starring Jason Bourne, the lethal assassin who rousted 007 out of the rut his franchise had slumbered in for too many years? About half that wish came true in our intriguing first look at The Bourne Conspiracy.

Yeah, we totally know what you’re expecting here — a crappy version of Splinter Cell with a car chase or two. And despite the healthy amount of skepticism we had tucked away in our back pockets as we arrived for our visit with developer High Moon Studios, Bourne Conspiracy surprised us at every turn with how it defies so many of the stereotypes we all have about movie-based games.

“It’s not a game you’ve played before with a Bourne skin on it,” declares Greg Goodrich, executive producer at Sierra. “Everything that goes into the game has to revolve around that. It’s about the fun of being Bourne — he’s an explosive weapon.” And “explosive” is the perfect way to describe the game’s pace, focus, and even its camera angles.

HIT HIM WITH YOUR PURSE

“Bourne is not Gucci,” Chris Ulm, High Moon’s chief development officer, offers with a smile. “He doesn’t have a ton of gear — he expects to improvise.” Instead of carrying around 17 rifles in an inexplicably deep back pocket, he takes out his enemies in Bourne Conspiracy by jamming pens into painful places, grabbing picture frames off walls and swinging for the fences, or yes, by waving about the odd magazine or two.

But these days, Bourne is a star — the kind of movie icon who inevitably shows up in a game, and Ulm’s point about how videogame Bourne creates havoc with everyday objects highlights how serious the development team is about staying true to a popular character and making a fun game. Ulm tells us upfront that “[the dev team plays] within the boundaries of the movies” without being handcuffed by them. So while Conspiracy lets you try your hand at all the big scenes from the first movie, it also fills in some of the backstory behind how Jason ended up getting amnesia and waging war against his former employer. It all happens at such a breathtaking pace — with such film-like camera angles — that it took us an embarrassingly long time to figure out that we weren’t watching a cutscene…that it was player-controlled gameplay in action.

KIDS, WEAR A LIFE JACKET

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s start at the beginning. Conspiracy opens with a scene familiar to movie fans: Bourne’s floating face-down in a stormy sea as a red distress beacon blinks steadily. Then a cross-dissolve fl ashes the player back to an apartment in Marseille, before the events of The Bourne Identity. Our hero still has his memory, and he’s just starting out on his latest assignment — to assassinate Wombosi, the African dissident. “In the movie, they call him a ‘malfunctioning $30-million weapon,’” says Ulm. “Here, he’s a functioning $30-million weapon.”

Wombosi’s men know Bourne is coming, so you face stiff resistance heading through the streets, bars, and docks of Marseille. Eventually, thanks to a strafing chopper and some exploding propane tanks, everything gets too noisy and public, and Conklin (Bourne’s superior officer in the movie and the book series) tries to wave him off. But Bourne disobeys orders, fakes his death so that Wombosi’s men relax, and then swims out to infiltrate Wombosi’s boat at night. Flashforward to the present as a drowning Bourne is rescued by passing fishermen…and that’s roughly the first two hours of the game.

You’ll also play through familiar scenes like the sprint through the American Embassy, the struggle to protect Bourne’s loved ones at the French farmhouse, and the climactic battle at Treadstone HQ (Bourne’s “agency”). As far as new turf goes, you’ll play fl ashback missions such as an assassination at a Lithuanian university, tracking a war criminal through the Zurich airport, and breathtaking shootouts in a modern-art museum and a church in Paris. In these scenarios, Conklin chatters in your ear, barking out ruthless orders at every turn...but you “get the sense that things are going wrong — the body count is high,” explains Ulm.

RUN LOLA RUN!

You may be too busy surviving in the game to be wracked with much guilt. “We want you to feel like a tidal wave’s chasing you in the levels,” says Matt Tieger, lead game designer at High Moon. “If you make a wrong turn, you’ll get caught. If Bourne stops, he’s [screwed].”

In our demo, that kind of tension was clammy-palm palpable. As Bourne sprinted through the American embassy, bullets thudded into the space he’d just exited and the third-person perspective shook and veered dramatically. “Cinematic gameplay is what we drive toward,” Tieger elaborates, “but if you recognize the camera in a game, it’s already broken. Instead, we give you the style equivalent of a movie, so you feel like you’re in one.”

The man ain’t kidding. We had him pause the demo to ask when the cutscenes would stop and the gameplay would start, and to our chagrin, it had been gameplay all along. In the fast-paced embassy sequence, the camera moves around dramatically to frame Bourne, cutting between various perspectives, shaking wildly to indicate a brutal impact, or zooming in close to frame a dramatic moment. It’s the kind of stuff we’ve only ever seen in canned cinematics, but Conspiracy pulls it off during all its gameplay with spectacular results. We’ve all heard the hyperbole about “playing the movie!” to the point of nausea, but Conspiracy sat us back in our seats by actually doing it for the first time.

NO TIME TO LOCK OR LOAD

The other element of that “tidal wave” is the pace and style of Conspiracy’s combat. “We didn’t want it to feel like there are shooting levels and fighting levels,” Goodrich explains with conviction. “You are Bourne, you are a weapon — whether you have a noodle in your hand or whatnot. If anyone gets in your way, they’re on their back.”

While Conspiracy certainly has sequences of regular ol’ shooting and fistfighting, they’re just there to charge up your adrenaline meter so that Bourne can absolutely pulverize people. If an embassy guard challenges you and that meter’s full, you simply duplicate an onscreen series of button-presses to nudge Bourne into berserker mode, grabbing the guard’s arm and burying him in the wall. On the Marseille dock, a fisherman swung a wrench at Bourne — bad idea. Bourne blocked the blow, shattered the guy’s leg with a kick, and then smashed his head into a wall-mounted fire extinguisher. That’ll learn him.

Charging up that meter won’t take too long: Tieger explains that he wants it to happen a lot. With the thunderous sound effects and dramatic camera angles that High Moon uses to frame these sequences, they’ll never get old. The gunfights have an identical style and pacing as your bullets quickly shred cover and force enemies into the open, and when your meter’s full, a similar mini-game–style takedown lets you dispatch several nemeses with a bullet through the forehead. After watching multiple play-throughs of the same section of docks, it’s easy to see how you can play however your mood strikes you, mixing fistfights and shootouts to deal with whatever tries to slow you down next.

“WE GOT A BUMP COMING UP”

Two other questions remain on the table. The first is multiplayer, and Conspiracy is unapologetically not including any. Goodrich explains that the single-player gameplay just doesn’t convert into multiplayer, which makes loads of sense when you think about it. But the other biggie is car chases — everyone loves that scorching scene from Identity where Bourne’s tearing through the streets of Paris. So will it be in the game? The team isn’t talking, but they are teasing: “Well, you’d expect it, right?” laughs Goodrich. Ulm adds coyly that “it’s only 2:03 minutes of the movie, but everyone remembers it.”

Translation? Don’t look for long, tedious driving levels behind the wheel of a rocket-launching Aston Martin. Conspiracy will likely serve up a brief Mini Cooper chase that’s intense enough to sit you firmly in your seat, and then get right back to the action. After all, Sierra and High Moon are determined to make this game a true crowd-pleaser.

“We’re in the Bourne business,” Goodrich concludes. “This is the beginning of a long franchise for us. Every piece of tech we put in, every step we take, has a longer view than just a one-off game.”