Headhunter

"R.I.P. Soldier of Fortune - you are but a ghost now..."

*Reviewing PAL version*

The Dreamcast hardware is really quite an incredible beast. With the ability to move umpteen million pixels around a TV screen per second (hey, you're the Tech guru, not me!), it gives game programmers the ability to render environments in greater depth and realism than previously thought possible on a home console. In an adventure/action third person perspective genre, such as where Soldier of Fortune, Resident Evil and Headhunter belong, that graphic ability has breathed new life into what was becoming a tawdry looking and stale section of the games shelves.

To look at Resident Evil, for example, on the Playstation or Saturn and then compare those versions with what has become possible on the DC, well, the gap is as wide as it is deep. Headhunter continues that enviable trend, pushing those pixels with enviable speed and accuracy, causing nearly everything that you see before you to seem exactly as it should be. Though something as small as a percussion mine (about the size of half a fingernail on the screen) could hardly be said to be rendered in immaculate detail, it is still fleshed out well enough as to be believable. And indeed, that is the secret of a game like this on the DC. The graphics are done to a standard that will have you believing near everything you touch, see or use.

Headhunter features a satisfying mix of puzzle-solving, time-based skill checks and just flat-out guns blazing action. As it doesn't 'run-on-rails', the free-roaming environment feels natural and gives a great sense of
freedom. This is especially apparent in the motorbike sections, where many options for tearing up the streets on your tire-smoking beast are available. I'm sure the more anally retentive fans of this game have many stories about gaining huge air across secret bridges, or entering hidden doorway accesses to previously unseen areas where they can pop wheel stands to their heart's content (check some message boards?). Regardless, just burning a snaking permanent black rubber strip from your wheels the first time you learn to do a 360 on this bike is probably plenty of reason enough for most gamers to want to take it for a spin.

That realism angle I was talking about before, the feeling of actually being immersed in the environment, has never been better showcased than in a title like Headhunter for the DC. My previous 'favorite title' of this genre (and I use that term very loosely, given that I didn't previously have a lot to choose from on this console) had been Soldier of Fortune. Though it got the realism factor pretty right (tough, gritty and very bloody graphics mixed with a Doom-like play perspective and carefully constructed ambience), it got the gameplay mechanics pretty damn wrong. I have never seen a game so squarely and relentlessly sodomized by load times alone before. I wanted desperately to love SoF and it had so much to love about it, but having to wait about as long as the time between Madonna's good movies for each new screen to load (my god, that's a LONG time!) was more than I could stand. I mean, that game must have set new world records for sloth. Whole countries have been annexed, liberated and re-captured during the times I've waited for the action to begin in Soldier of Fortune. The game underneath (and we) deserved so much better.

Thankfully, Headhunter suffers none (or very little) of this problem. At the point in the game where you begin riding around on the motorbike, in-between the checkpoints, there is a noticeable lag as a whole new section is inserted into console RAM. However, its never jarring, but short and totally forgivable (the areas are, after all, huge free-roam spaces that would require plenty of space in memory...I think). Otherwise, most breaks in the action are entirely normal for this type of disc-based system and in some cases, the load times are shorter in this title than in many other games.

Voice acting is of the highest standard, leaving that from Metal Gear Solid (which is often held up as the zenith of this experience) in it's wake. Every character is believable, consistent, humorous and all of them make the very poor sexual analogies and jokes attempted by Solid Snake and crew in MGS look, well, just sad and infantile in the extreme. Sound is also consistently excellent in Headhunter, from the roar of your screaming bike engine beneath you on the streets, to the crystal clear ping of a ricocheting bullet, to the grenade explosion in an echoing underground car park. Everything sounds right and is nothing less than you'd expect from a production of this overall quality.

Speaking of MGS, this game owes quite a lot to that title's VR section. Headhunter has its own VR part with best time challenges and so forth and though very different in its look and feel, its obvious where the idea was stolen from. That's ok I suppose: its hard to be totally original in everything you do and Headhunter makes no attempt to disguise the fact (it even uses the same name as MGS does for this section). In play though, it is an entirely new and exciting creature, focussing much less on the stealth aspect and allowing much more freedom to kill and maim at will.

For me, this is the big selling point of Headhunter (as it was for Sof) over other titles like MGS or even Tenchu. I'm not much interested in stealth, nor creeping around returning candy to babies without upsetting anyone's apple cart. I mean, the concept is fine, it works really well in some games and I can understand how many fans go ga-ga for it. But its not why I play video-games. I get into titles like this because I CAN'T (or won't) kill people for a Super model scientist's daughter in real life. I'm into Headhunter because I can't (or won't) do 240kms on a street bike around my town center every other day. I play this escapist entertainment because taking out government agents with grenades, sniping bad guys with machine guns and driving like a dangerous maniac has not been legally sanctioned (and won't be) in my town this year. How about your's?

If you are a Soldier of Fortune fan (man, you are one patient game player!), stop flogging a dead horse and consider switching to this far superior game right now. Go on, claim at least half your life back! If not, forget the others titles anyway and give this game a shot. Pound for pound it delivers more high class action, presented in better environments, more consistently and much quicker (!) than 90% of its competition. That's reason enough to consider it the new king of the action/adventure genre on the DC.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/10/02, Updated 01/10/02