Spy Hunter

"Let’s whip out the CD of the Peter Gunn theme for our listening pleasure during the commercials of the James Bond marathon"

OPENING STATEMENT
James Bond killed Xenia. If you think I’m talking about Xena: Warrior Princess, just give up on Spy Hunter right now, as this game is not for you. This game is for the hardworking, the fearless spy, the spy that will not take any crap from his foes. He will merely blow the hell out of them if you do not cooperate. If you have seen every James Bond movie, recorded every Peter Gunn and Get Smart, and you got one of those hideous spy watches from a box of Corn Flakes when you were seven, this game is for you.

GAMEPLAY--6
Spy Hunter (the new edition) stays as true as possible to the original Spy Hunter, which is no small feat, considering the gap between the games numbers almost twenty years, and it switches from an overhead two-dimensional game to a three-dimensional action game. Your stylish little vehicle still can do all of the same things - missiles, smoke screens, oil slicks, anything that your car can hold to help the spy on the go.

And you will likely use all of those defensive and offensive mechanisms at one point or another. You’ll have to deal with enemies by air, land, and sea. You’ll need to blow them up, distract them, and evade them. And even your morphing vehicle needs some assistance. That is correct. When entering a river or a lake, your car morphs into a hydrocraft that skims along the top of the water. Then, when reaching the shore again, it changes right back. Also, when your vehicle is quite near to utter and total destruction, it morphs again. This time it changes into a motorcycle (on land) or a jet-ski (in the water). These vehicles do not have as much defensive protection as the full vehicles do, but they are somewhat faster.

Throughout each mission you will have a variety of objectives, which range from collecting all four catacombs and minimizing civilian casualties (both are objectives in all missions) to deploying tracking devices on helicopters and blowing up satellite trucks. Very James Bond, huh? That is essentially what Spy Hunter is - the partner of a Bond shooter, though much more poorly executed.

GRAPHICS--4
This is the least visually impressive GameCube game that I have ever played. It looks like a late-generation Nintendo 64 game, except for it manages to be slightly blurrier. One look at the opening FMV of the Mission Mode will tell you that you are not in for a visual delight. That FMV, both in styling and in its image clarity, seems ripped out of an extremely early Tomb Raider game - if not the first one, then the second. The animation even is delayed in it, as the flames flicker with pauses when all is completely still. The FMVs as you progress through Spy Hunter fail to get any better in the least.

While the FMVs are certainly the worst part of the graphical makeup, the rest of Spy Hunter is somewhat better. The animation is quite smoother, but there are still spots of jerkiness that you can see the cars ‘jump’ a little bit, especially when there are lots of foes on screen, or when you are making a sharp turn. Midway should not have allowed any lapses to have in the animation.

The vehicles look cool at first, but the polygons begin to tear as the mission goes on, as the framerate drops to unforgivable levels. The trademark Nintendo 64 blur (Yes, on a GameCube game.) covers up all, making you think you’re looking through coke-bottle glasses all the time. This causes the colors of items, which were clearly intended to be bright, to stand out against the more demure backgrounds, to smudge, and begin to blend in a bit, making locating items a chore.

The backgrounds fit in with a theme for the location (quaint European village, major power complex, et cetera) quite nicely, but, again, the fuzziness of the graphics hides details that could help make Spy Hunter far more impressive. If Midway ever realizes that they are working on the new console, and not the old one, we may someday be in for a treat. Instead we will have to settle for flowers in planters that look like pink dots on green lines, and for wood buildings in which you cannot tell where one plank starts and another ends. The devil is in the details.

MUSIC--9
SOUND--5
You have all heard it before. The theme from Peter Gunn is one of the more famous television show tracks around. The key is that you do not likely associate it with an obscure show from the 1950s. Anyway, Midway got their music department cracking on this song, and the remixed version that provides the soundtrack to the game is probably the best element of this vehicular action title. The other music is rather basic and simplistic, but the Peter Gunn theme carries this.

The sound effects are workable, but nothing spectacular. They are also slightly fuzzy. Kind of like the blurriness that surrounds and overwhelms the graphics. I sense a theme here. The fuzziness of the sound is not even that noticeable, unless you have come across a rather large explosion. Then, if you listen carefully, you can hear the sound catch a little bit, almost like an old record player does.

The effects themselves are fairly nice (other than the lack of sound clarity), but there are not enough of them. Throughout the entire game, there are probably about thirty different effects. For an action game like this, that means lots of repetition. We have similar, if not the same sounds, for any number of actions that should more clearly defined. The engine effects stay rather constant throughout driving, and do not seem to change well with the speed that you are going. The only sounds and noises that seem to have actually had some time spent developing them occur when your vehicle switches forms in one way or another. Of course, for all of these switches, they repeat the same sound, bringing the one good effect back to the fault of them all.

CONTROL--8
Spy Hunter controls quite well. The interface is very serviceable, and the only functions that I had problems carrying out where some of those involving aiming with a weapon that does not home in on its target. The aiming mechanisms were a bit to random, and they very rarely made it possible for pinpoint accuracy. Your vehicle handles quite nicely, accurately taking speed into consideration when driving. The faster you go, the harder it is to make large adjustments in your handling. So, when you are going through the cone maze on your training runs, take it slow. The one quirk I did find with the control is that your vehicle controls slightly tighter on the water, compared with driving on land. Chalk that one up to not having to grip the surface that you’re moving along.

FUN--2
Spy Hunter is not fun at all. Instead of being a multiplayer powerhouse, like it could have been, it is essentially a solo-player spy sojourn. Instead of racing your opponents through winding curves, blowing each other up with high powered arenas in death matches, you have been presented with multiplayer gems like ‘kill as many chickens as possible’ and ‘go as fast as humanly possible to the end of the exact same stage you just beat in the Story Mode.’ What fun! And no multiplayer levels are opened up until you COMPLETELY max out the stage in single player - every rinky-dink requirement must be completed, so you need to have already mastered Spy Hunter before you reach its full, albeit limited, multiplayer potential. Besides, there is only one type of level for each mission site anyway. And the game has already picked them. So, if you want to just speed as fast as you can in the most boring race from hell to the finish in a level that’s wired for killing chickens, well, then you are just out of luck. No dedicated multiplayer levels are found here. Instead, we get crappy multiplayer modes in levels that are really poorly laid out for more than one player anyway. Oh well. That’s just Midway living up to their reputation again.

CHALLENGE--MEDIUM TO HIGH
After the first training mission, I expected Spy Hunter’s difficulty curve to be a more gradual slope than that of a Colorado foothill. It ended up to be more like Pike’s Peak. The first actual mission was easy enough. Then the difficulty level started skyrocketing. Objects you needed to find, things you needed to destroy, all became hidden in the darndest of places. Out of the way places, from which you had to backtrack. If you made one wrong turn, might as well just quit the mission now. And, on top of it all, you had to beat every single requirement to open up that level in multiplayer. Every single one! And there is always some meaningless requirement there just to make the mission more challenging, so unlocking all of these missions in multiplayer becomes next to impossible.

REPLAY VALUE--LOW TO MEDIUM
Since the multiplayer capabilities in Spy Hunter are severely limited, you really will not be spending a whole lot of time playing it after you beat all of the single player missions. For each level there is one multiplayer mode, be it Chicken Run, just a normal race, or something else. None of which are overly entertaining. A friend and I started to play it, and we stopped after about fifteen minutes and headed off to play some Super Monkey Ball instead.

PROS
*Brings a new element to the vehicular combat sub-genre.
*Engaging mission requirements.
*Features a nice, remixed version of the classic Peter Gunn theme.

CONS
*Horrible, grainy graphics.
*Primitive multiplayer features.
*Annoying system of unlocking additional missions.

CLOSING STATEMENT
This Spy Hunter is a decent revival of a classic arcade game, something of a rarity in today’s time. But the GameCube version seems rushed and unpolished, so if you are itching to play Spy Hunter, pick up the PlayStation 2 version instead. It offers a much cleaner presentation, which can make a big difference in saving crucial seconds in some of the later missions.

OVERALL--5

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 06/14/02, Updated 06/14/02