Spy Hunter

"Midway has soiled a classic..."

I admit it. Im a big fan of the origanal Spy Hunter for arcades and the NES. that was a creative,fun game and i could play it for hours non-stop. The gamecube remake promised to take the series to a whole new level, but sadly, they jumped backwards.

Graphics: 4/10 Your Interceptor looks pretty decent, but anything else looks blocky. the textures look like what you would find on a PSX. And when you shoot a enemy car/boat/helicoptor, they explode into little tiny squares. The backgrounds also tend to look pretty dull and uninspired.

Sound: 2/10 ugh...the music is techno, which i admire, but it is dull,repetitive, and boring. Saliva's Spy Hunter theme is cool, and so is the theme from Peter Gunn, but all the music lacks. The sounds arnt much better, the machine guns sound like a ticking clock, and your Interceptor's voice sounds like it was made from magnetic-refridgerator poetry.

Story: 3/10 You are a spy. You have to stop NOSTRA's scheme to destroy the world with the ''Four Horsemen'', a buncha satillites. yawn. Ive seen stuff like this before and its not deep or creative. it sounds like a idea that took 6 minutes to make.

Gameplay: 4/10 I gave this a 4 because it still has the classic Spy Hunter touches. (The weapons vans/boats, the transforming interceptor, the weapons,the smokescreen/oil slick,etc) but,there is nothing new or interesting here at all mission objectives repeat over and over, with SOME new stuff, but very little. Its just the old run-and-gun-everything every mission.you cant even replay previous missions with the stuff you already unlocked! Midway took a brave twist and added a escort mission, but they still are difficult and unoriganal. you'll have to repeat some missions over again due to unclear objectives or just plain difficulty. the levels also tend to be uninspired. Some missions got creative, like the level where you have to go on a racetrack, but there is very little variety here.

Replay value: 7/10 there are a lot of stuff here to unlock like a ''Puke Cam'' or Saliva's Spy Hunter video, or the video of ''Your disease'', also by Saliva. To get these, you have beat a mission and all of its objectives in a certain amount of time, which can be very hard at times.

THE PROS:
-Gameplay sticks to the origanal
-Cool extras to unlock
-The Peter Gunn theme

THE CONS:
-unpolished gameplay
-blocky graphics
-everything else

Rent/Buy?: neither, just stay away from this. i can only pray that the upcoming Spy hunter 2 will wash the memories of this away.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 04/22/03, Updated 04/22/03