Review

You remember Spy Hunter don’t you? This Midway arcade classic, heavily inspired by 007’s submersible Lotus, placed the gamer at the controls of a heavily armoured sports car with the aim being to drive up the screen, shooting bad guys and surviving as long as possible. I never played the Arcade version until fairly recently, but the Spectrum version was loaded up with alarming regularity during the 80’s.

Then in 2001 came the inevitable remake, switching the view from overhead to the much more familiar behind the car we’re used to. It was, in my opinion, a resounding success: it looked good, played well and offered an addictive challenge. Unfortunately, the less said about the hastily cobbled together (by a different developer, I might add) follow-up the better.

Now we get Spy Hunter: Nowhere To Run, trying to restore some of the lost glory for the series. Bizarrely, this is based on the forthcoming movie of the same name, but according to imdb.com they haven’t even started filming that yet, but that means that we get The Rock providing his voice and likeness to the lead character. What’s most bizarre about this is that releasing the game and movie together would surely have benefited both, mainly because the game feels like a work in progress rather than a finished product!

In addition to the expected driving and shooting action, we now also get to take part in missions out of the car as well. These generally involve running around trying to find a switch that will unlock a gate so you can drive on, but are also the best bits of the game by far. The fighting controls work reasonably well as do the shooting and stealth (yawn!) sections. Also, because of the film, there’s a fairly decent plot linking the levels together, we’re not talking Shakespeare but it’s better than you’d expect from this game.

Unfortunately, the reason we play Spy Hunter is for vehicular carnage not wrestling and gunning down henchmen. The concept of driving a car that can double as a boat is still a genius one, but the handling of it here is totally inept.

Every time you start to have fun, the game goes out of its way to remind you how bad it actually is. Steering the car is handled by the analogue stick but it so twitchy that trying to line yourself up for a jump because virtually impossible and it gets even worse when you switch to a motorbike on some levels, the first of these I got through purely out of luck rather than anything approaching skill!

I put the blame for this mess firmly on the shoulders of developers Terminal Reality who’s output thus far, (Aeon Flux, Blood Rayne 1 and 2) has been pretty forgettable and suffered from a number of the same graphical problems on display here. Where were Paradigm Entertainment when Midway needed them to return? Hell, with games like Psi-Ops behind them they could have done a much better job themselves!

I almost decided to give an extra mark for the fact that it includes the arcade original as an unlockable extra, but then realised if you wanted to play that you could pick up Midway Arcade Treasures for less than a tenner!

About the Review

Platform

Sony Playstation 2

Developer

Terminal Reality

Publisher

Midway

Released

8th September 2006