Platform: PS2
ERSB: T – Teen
Genre: Acton
Number of Players: 1
Publisher: Midway
Release Date: US September 2006
Official Website
Writer: Typhoid

Rating: 2.0

Spyhunter: No Where to Run, No Where to Hide from this Game

I heard that there was a new Spyhunter game coming out, and it was supposed to be in conjunction with a Spyhunter movie starring The Rock. WOW! YAY! I love Spyhunter! Until I brought it home and played it. Now I want to sue the game creators for the price of this game plus pain and suffering. Each sequential Spyhunter seems to be worse than the last one, and this game is certainly an overachiever. This game has enough suck for another 10 releases.

Graphics:
The opening cinematics are so beautiful- especially of the Interceptor vehicle- that it makes the in-game graphics disappointing. However they are decent for a PS2. Too bad they didn’t put some of that effort into making a game that wasn’t torture to play.

Controls:
This is the first Spyhunter game that actually ventures on foot. It is this which is the main downfall of the game. While the vehicle modes had bad controls, the person controls just about made me throw the controller against the wall. I honestly can’t say which is worse: the fact that the controls are muddy or that the moves are so incredibly specific that you can’t possibly fudge them. I’d say it’s a matter of luck (not skill) whether anything would work in this game, but NO ONE has luck good enough to play this game. The media is blaming the wrong video games for violence; blame games that suck this much I’m inclined to strangle someone with the controller wire…preferably whoever is responsible for letting this game exist.

Sound:
Though unimpressive, they didn’t completely suck. But honestly at this point who cares?

Flow:
If this game had flow, I didn’t find it. The story was choppy, the missions were unclear so the game screeched to a halt constantly, and whatever was left was buggy. In the second mission of the game I was just about screaming. You- along with the Interceptor- have been captured and taken onto a barge. You need to enter the hanger and find a way into the rest of the ship. You need to place explosive charges around the ship, while coordinating with another agent in order to keep the Interceptor out of enemy hands. It took me about two hours to get past the “enter the hanger” part, and not because it’s a lengthy scenario. After entering the hanger the door locks behind you, and a sequence is triggered in which an enemy is pacing back and forth on the other side of a few rows of supplies. If he sees you (guaranteed if you place a charge), you have to kill him. Another enemy immediately enters through a one-way automatic door. After killing about 50 enemies and searching the room for non-existent other options, I restarted the game. I searched all of the ship that I could reach before the hanger and found nothing. I went back to my red-shirt massacre, and my boyfriend and I traded turns to see if either of us could figure it out. At about kill 200, suddenly there was a dialogue box that instructed us to do a specific sequence of punches and suddenly we could advance through the automatic door. This kind of buggy crap is common in the game. Clearly the punch instructions were meant to be seen long ago.

Fun Factor:
The first few minutes of the game were pretty fun because you were still in a vehicle. The second you step out of the car every ounce of fun is sucked out of this game. Please don’t buy this game, there is a chance you’ll do harm to your PS2 in your mad rush to remove and destroy the disc.

Is there a female playable character:
Seriously, in the first walking scene, why didn’t the scientist woman pick up the gun? Here I am, about to be attacked by a squad of enemies and the gun is laying at her feet. Clearly in this game, the princess does not save herself or anyone else.

Replay Value:
This game doesn’t even have “finish” value, let alone replay value. It’s not a playable game, due to the bugs. I don’t even know if it would have been fun even without them.

The controls were terrible, the flow was choppy, the missions were confusing and the bugs made the game unplayable. This game had the air of a game that was pushed out before it was ready. Since the movie itself disappeared in a cloud of failure, perhaps they released the game before it could get cancelled? I really wish that had been the case, I wasted $40 on this piece of crap. Boo-urns!