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It is always hard to create a game based on an existing intellectual property.  On one hand you are strained to put in a link to the original source material, but at the same time, you want to put your own creative spin on the property.  With Prison Break: The Conspiracy,  Deep Silver has created a title that lifts key elements and sequences from the series down to the dialog, but adds new elements like stealth and combat to the mix.  Unfortunately, these new additions never lift the title from a below average title.

Prison Break features most of the characters from the first season of the television show of the same name, and most of the actors reprise their roles in the game.  The player is featured as a new character to the universe, Tom Paxton, who is an undercover Company agent that has been sent into Fox River Penitentiary to assure that Lincoln Burrows is put to death as scheduled.  Along the way, he uncovers a conspiracy that is featured in the show storyline, as well as a second conspiracy thread involving him.  The story is a bit flimsy at times, but it facilitates the game well enough, and mixes in enough significant moments from the television show that should grab people that like Prison Break.

The game plays out as an adventure/puzzle game, but it mixes in a lot of stealth segments where you have to sneak around off-limit areas of Fox River Penitentiary.  Normally these stealth sequences require you to move around a room, while staying out of the sight of randomly placed people set on extremely scripted movements or the slowest rotating cameras ever invented.  At first, I was psyched about sneaking around a prison, finding new elements fleshing out the conspiracy surrounding Tom Paxton, but the stealth mechanics are horribly implemented.  Sometimes, people will spot you from across the room if one hand is sticking out of cover, while other times, I could be standing right next to someone and they would never see me.  Also, there seem to be trigger points to move people throughout the environment.  At one point, I got to a hallway and could not figure out how to get down the hallway, past a guard that was shining his light down the hall.  I then found out that the guard would never move unless you specifically moved Tom Paxton into a specific cover point, at which point, the guard moved on his way.  This happens quite a bit, and can be annoying when you cannot figure out where the developer wanted you to go into cover.

Prison fights are another big mechanic built into the game, in which, you can win money by fighting progressively harder inmates.  Fighting is a simple affair, using a soft punch, hard punch and a block.  While the fights have the right kind of atmosphere, with the two combatants close in and kind of gritty, the fighting mechanic feels unpolished and broken.  Many times, I could just spam the soft punch over and over in quick succession to take care of an opponent.  Also, it seems that range does play a factor in your fights.  When I came right up on someone, I normally would have problems with connecting punches.  Moving out a little bit fixed that issue, but the space between the two fighters felt a little too wide.  The funny thing is that the money you win never seemed to play into anything until one point at the end, and you only had to do one mandatory fight to make the amount of money needed to progress the storyline.  If there was stuff to buy in the game, I certainly did not find it at any point in the game.

When I started playing Prison Break: The Conspiracy, Netflix had conveniently added the show to their Instant Streaming lineup.  Being that I had never watched an episode of the show, I boned up on my Prison Break lore, learning characters and some of the story.  Taking that back to the game, I was impressed at the job Deep Silver did with recreating Fox River State Penitentiary.  All the locations from the show are there, and they are done with excellent detail.  The characters however, are a bit hit and miss.  While Schofield, Burrows and Abruzzi are close to their real life counterparts, others like T-Bag and Sucre look nothing like their counterparts in the show.  Dialog on the other hand is atrocious.  It was only after doing some research that I found out most of the characters from the show did their own voice work, but it certainly did not sound like it.  On a podcast, I actually stated that no one had provided their own voice work, and I was wrong.  Everyone outside of the female doctor did their own voice work, but it sounded so uninspired and bland that it could have been anyone doing the voices at that point.

Even with a number of flaws to the trained eye, a fan of the show will enjoy the fan service that the developers have implemented into Prison Break: The Conspiracy.  This is a game that is definitely made for that fanbase.  That said, everyone else will lament the poor stealth and below average fighting mechanics.  There was a lot that could have been done with Prison Break: The Conspiracy, as it has a rich universe to pull from, but in the end, it falls flat with its mediocre execution.  Prison Break: The Conspiracy gets a 2 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.
Check out Prison Break: The Conspiracy and other Xbox 360  reviews at Test Freaks.