Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run (PS2) Review
Posted by Chris McCarver on 09.14.2006
Can you SMEEEEELLLLLLLLALALA... how bad this game sucks?
Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run
Publisher: Midway
Developer: Terminal Reality
Platform: Playstation 2 (also available for Xbox, backwards-compatible with Xbox 360)
ESRB Rating: T (blood, mild language, violence)
Release Date: September 5, 2006
Review by CHRIS McCARVER
Spy Hunter was always one of my favorite arcade games. As a kid for whom watching "Knight Rider" was a weekly ritual (yeah, I'm old and I had no taste), climbing behind the wheel of a James Bond gadget-car was a dream come true. As a much more jaded 20-something, I was reluctant to accept Midway's 2001 relaunch of the game on the PS2, but I was pleasantly surprised at the update to the coin-op classic. The Interceptor was fluidly brought to life as a sleek 3-D monster machine, but the game kept many of the elements of the arcade original as a knowing nod to the quarter-eater crowd. Two sequels to the PS2 reimagining of Spy Hunter have since been burned to DVD-ROM, and the latest of these, Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run, that marks a major new earmark: combining third-person shooter action with the vehicular combat.
Okay, it also has former WWE champion Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson playing the lead character. So... two earmarks then. I suppose.
Here's the lowdown.
Graphics
This unfortunately is the greatest downfall of the game. Quite honestly, purely speaking in terms of graphics, this is one of the singly worst looking titles I've ever had the displeasure to boot up. The character models would have been considered above-average if this was the late 90's and my Playstation didn't have a "2" on the end. But in the here and now, the facial animations about as rudimentary as X-Play's cut-out lip-flap animations, only without the humor and charm. While the main character, super-spy Alex Decker, is textured with a very nice likeness of the former Mr. Maivia, one can easily plug in one of the WWE SmackDown! titles (literally any of them) to see a more lifelike and emotive model of him. And with cutscenes largely animated with the in-game graphics engine, that's a lot of ugly narrative playing on your flat-screen. On the upside, Decker moves very fluidly when dealing out unarmed beatdowns, with a number of The Rock's signature wrestling moves incorporated into his fighting style. Unfortunately, Decker moves through the levels with all the urgency of a lethargic slug, never effecting more than a relaxed jog. One last bit about the character animations, many is the time that we have to enter and exit the interceptor at crucial context points, but we never see Decker climb in and out of the car. Entrance and exit from the Interceptor is cheapened out by a fade-out approach, which, when we've seen character jump in and out of cars in numerous action games, seems awfully lazy from a development standpoint.
The camera system has its own significant share of bugs as well, particularly in the on-foot levels. The game's third-person controls operate with the standard two-stick interface, but the response time with the right analog stick is very sluggish. The lack of ease in controlling the game camera is worsened when the character arms himself with a ranged weapon. The camera automatically moves to an over-the-shoulder perspective similar to that of Resident Evil 4, but the response time with the right stick gets even slower when in this mode of movement, making firefights a bit on the overly deadly side. And don't count on camera control when driving the Interceptor; the camera angle stays relatively fixed center forward. That is, of course, unless you manage to activate one of the Burnout-like slow-mo camera cuts by destroying your enemies in the vehicle levels, which the game seems to have little rhyme or reason as to which vehicle takedowns it decides to ascribe said camera cuts.
The backgrounds are nicely detailed and vehicle objects, but the pixelation displayed therein is dated to the point of nigh unforgivable. All the graphic detail of the gamescape is horribly low-resolution and muddy, which can get sickening to play through, especially with the sheer amount of enemies that can appear on-screen at once. Also a major deficit is the game's water animation, seen quite a bit during the game's speedboat levels. The water looks almost perpetually flat and featureless, as though your riding along a shiny blue blanket rather than blasting through the surf. One positive though is the lack of framerate slowdown with the dozens of moving characters and/or vehicles that can occupy your field of view at the same time.
Gameplay
The game plants the player in the shoes of covert operative Alex Decker, Nowhere to Run being the first time in the game franchise that the driver of the Interceptor has been seen out from behind the supercar's steering wheel. As with the previous games, you run Decker through a number of missions against the evil spy network called NOSTRA. Unlike the previous Spy Hunter games, the player gets to play Decker out of his gadget-laden supercar as well as in. And, rather than simply driving and shooting your way through the levels, there's actually a bit of gameplay variety here.
The controls handle like much of the third-person genre-blenders on the market, using the aforementioned two-stick movement interface on foot and the standard driving controls found on every car-based game worth its salt. Unfortunately, playing through the levels in either fashion has characteristic numbers of drawbacks. A detriment to both play styles is the game's autosaving at predestined checkpoints. If Decker dies, it resets you to that checkpoint with the exact amount of health you had at the time of the last save. Your only options, assuming the last autosave was at a point when your health is considerably low, is to either start the level or the entire game over, which can each be a headache depending on how far in the game you've played.
The on-foot missions are pretty much your typical run-and-gun levels, but thankfully the endless firefights are broken up by minigames and puzzles, wherein you'll do something as simple as arming bombs and entering security codes or tasks a bit more complex, like setting a set of reflective shields so a big laser cannon can blast you an exit out of a closed room. Unfortunately, the sluggish aiming movement and the equally weak enemy AI means you'll be doing a lot of standing around taking fire while you try to get your aiming reticle onto an enemy soldier's vital meat by-products. The unarmed combat system is much more effective than the gunplay engine, wherein Decker is capable of a wide variety of strikes and takedown moves, many of which are more lethal and bone-shattering variations on The Rock's repertoire of wrestling maneuvers, all of which feels quite intuitive and very satisfying when pulled off successfully.
The combat driving levels are quite frenetic and are rife with endless numbers of NOSTRA Hummers, attack choppers, and assault watercraft raining various forms of explosive death on your tricked-out spymobile. Unfortunately, said levels are fairly linear with minimal alternate routes to take and the Interceptor's transformation capabilities are done mostly for you in order to take the configuration (be it car, speedboat, or motorcycle) best suited for a specific chunk of the game. The Interceptor's gadgets and weaponry are extremely varied and will have you making use of nearly every button on your controller. While the game does give you tutorial cues intermittently, those cues often come at a time when you'll be paying more attention to not dying than how to use the nifty new widgets. Although the combat driving segments of the game are largely just driving and shooting, the title provides a bit of strategy in the form of deploying countermeasures such as smokescreens, oil slicks, and missile-diverting chaff. The game also offers a nifty little feature called Salvo Mode, wherein, when faced with multiple enemies at once, the game freezes allowing the player to move a reticle over each of the enemies in a short interval of time. Once the time expires, the game unfreezes and each of the tagged enemies are attacked at once by a salvo of missiles.
Sound
The music score for Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run is consistent with the franchise's mixture of the classic Peter Gunn theme and the James Bond music library. The music is a pulse-pounding yet unobtrusive action beat that augments the gameplay, which can get pretty intense on its own. Don't worry about any of the BGM tracks getting stuck in your head, though, as they're easily forgettable in the ballet of bullets, bombs, and broken bones.
Unfortunately, what can also get forgettable about the game is the voice-over work. The voice acting is not necessarily bad; in fact, the dialogue is deftly written and performed, if a bit action-movie cliché. Whereas The Rock's last starring VO role in a video game, Scorpion King: Rise of the Akkadian (which I reviewed for the previous incarnation of 411 Games), cheaped itself out by having the Brahma Bull voicing only a portion of his dialogue, every line of Alex Decker's dialogue is delivered and delivered quite well by The Rock. The remainder of the voice cast supplements The Rock as a well-cast supporting ensemble and will likely be no stranger to anime and videogame fans, including Steven Blum (Vincent Valentine in Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus) and Kari Wahlgren (the title character of Witch Hunter Robin), the latter of whom voices all the game's female characters.
But, Chris, you likely wonder, you said the voice acting was forgettable. I did, because as good as the voices are, the horrible audio mixing job in this title tends to cover it up all too much. Often the sound effects and music completely drown out the cutscene dialogue in terms of sheer volume. And woe be the player who tries to decipher what a character's saying when an in-game sequence has multiple speaking characters, since they often will speak over one another in a messy vocal morass.
Lasting Appeal
Excelling at each of the game's levels unlocks a number of bonus game modes and unlockable weapons, but quite honestly, unless you're engrossed by the game's storyline, players will find little motivation to reach the 100% completion brass-ring. The game is fairly linear in its core gameplay, its thin veil of apparent variety nowhere near cutting the mustard in terms of replay value. The game also has absolutely no online component (at least not on the PS2), so pack away your dreams for "Goldeneye on wheels" deathmatches. Chances are, unless you're feeling nostalgic once the movie on which this game is based is released next year (yes, this game is based on a movie scheduled for tentative release in 2007), this title will either wind up as a coaster or an EB Games trade-in within a few months, whether you've played it to completion or not.
Fun Factor
Playing through this game was largely a trial-and-error chore. Completing the levels provided little to no accomplishment, as it's possible to lumber through the game's missions willy-nilly and luck your way into completion. Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run provides little innovation and even less variety in terms of its gameplay. Combining that with its mediocre graphics and hard-on-the-ears audio package makes calling this game substandard something of a parting gift. Fans of the Spy Hunter franchise will likely have much to say about this title in the negative, its detours into Third-Person-Shooterville and primary focus more on the driver than the car arguably viewable as too much a stretch beyond the series' theme constraints. Even as a movie tie-in game without a movie (something of a first there, I'd imagine), it's still another example of a weak movie tie-in even with its roots firmly planted in gaming.
The 411
While I understand Midway and developer Terminal Reality's need to showcase The Rock and his action-star status for the sake of this game, Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run takes the franchise into entirely new and, sadly, entirely unwanted territory. Even with the out-of-place on-foot gameplay elements, the game would still fall flat due to its lackluster presentation and minimal level of actual fun. The game isn't without its pros, but weigh them against its compost pile of cons, and Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run becomes little more than a Z-list title relegated to the bargain bin. Thanks for trying, Midway, but this ride's a broken-down lemon.
Graphics
3.5
Heavy pixelation, dated character models, blatant animation cop-outs, sluggish camera control
Gameplay
5.5
Linear on foot and on the road, braindead enemy AI, some nifty puzzles
Sound
6.0
Above-average music and voice work, lousy sound editing ruins it all
Lasting Appeal
2.5
Cliche storyline, no online play
Fun Factor
4.0
Underwhelming on the whole, level completion is unsatisfying
