Headhunter

"Equip those shades, Jack... There's danger afoot!"

I wrote a Haiku to start things off.

“Hi ladies, I’m Jack--
I shoot men for their organs.
No, wait! Please come back.”

To get the full effect, pretend that you’re in the future, because that’s where Jack Wade is, sans much of his memory after breaking out of a biotech center. In the future, things don’t seem terribly far off from where they are now: people still drive normal looking cars around L.A. (though there seems to be much less traffic), but their organs don’t work so good. Their precious, delicious organs.

Ahem.

To counter the worldwide demand for a working collection of human parts, conventional weapons have been banned in order to make way for a new wave of neural-shock pistols and shotguns that fry one’s brain while leaving the glorious innards safely intact. The organ harvesting needs of this future society have necessitated better law enforcement (prisoners and dead felons have no need for kidneys) as well as larger biotech firms for transplants—- much like the one you clawed your way out of.

Jack Wade falls on the other side of the two occupations as a former Headhunter, a paid police mercenary in layman's terms. Jack is able to piece his memory back little by little, and from there is reintroduced to his former associates who get him back on his feet in order to bust some perps and unravel the conspiracy that goes hand-in-hand with the future. It’s nothing on par with Metal Gear Solid; expect to find a similar story arc on a Sci-Fi channel TV movie.

Jack’s quest is broken into two clever pieces: Before running headfirst into a mission, Jack must drive to a location himself with his speedy motorcycle and pass a battery of police tests in a series of MGS-esque VR missions in order to gain or upgrade his headhunter’s license. The segments make Jack a little more believable as a character, mainly because it feels like you have a job while also concreting the time-period of the game—it’s easier to swallow the not-so-distantness of the future when it’s familiar.

The meat of the game is within Jack’s adventures, license in one hand and a gun in the other. Headhunter plays a little bit like Syphon Filter crossbred with Metal Gear Solid and spliced with some Devil May Cry. Unfortunately, it’s not as solid as any of those titles. This isn’t to say that these segments are bad by any means, but Jack’s control hardly seems adequate to stop the forces of evil at first.

Though the Resident Evil style “sit ‘n spin” controls have been ditched, causing the game to play much faster compared to its contemporaries, Jack’s targeting leaves much to be desired. Headhunter shares much of Syphon Filter’s control, where pressing the R1 button will bring up an auto-aim reticule, but the difference in the two games comes in that Jack cannot automatically aim behind him; this makes maneuvering and attacking a chore in many cases, where you need to run at your opponent (fighting the camera the whole time in certain instances) in order to lock onto him.

The difficulties herein are often bypassed by the game’s stealth system, which is in essence much like a poor man’s Metal Gear Solid. Jack’s radar shows the direction that each guard is facing on a certain floor, allowing you to walk up behind them and break their neck—assuming the game recognizes the command. What’s equally as likely is that you’ll end up shooting them point-blank (for the same amount of damage as normal), causing them to alert everyone in the area as they twist around and pistol-whip you despite a gunshot wound to the skull.

Behold: the worst puzzle I've ever run across.

Also to be expected in a game such as this are the obligatory puzzle elements. Headhunter’s gauntlet of brain-teasers are terribly mundane, however: the first major one you come across involves using a car-wash token to get a wire to repair a circuit-breaker which lowers a car with a fire extinguisher inside that you use to put out a fire to get a crowbar—which you use to open a very regular looking door that has a few boards flimsily nailed onto it. The puzzles show an occasional hint at originality, like having to defuse a bomb by matching PS2 controller inputs, but sadly these moments are as entertaining as they are exceedingly rare.

Headhunter is more successful at its other puzzles: the boss fights. Capping each quest is a fight with some large and burly opponent that can rarely be defeated by conventional means. The bosses in Headhunter require some real thought and intuition to defeat (or a FAQ, more likely) while working well within the game’s engine. It’s a shame that there are hardly enough of them. In one instance, you're forced to destroy the search lights of a gun emplacement by hurling grenades from behind cover. In another, you actually program the projectiles a boss sends after you, acidic spider bombs, so that they turn back around and leap at their former master.

When your targeting works and you can successfully sneak around, the game is much more fun to play. The combat system, minus a few quirks, allows for some very thrilling and cinematic moments—- features that many games of this ilk fail to deliver. In terms of being cinematic, Headhunter boasts a very large amount of full motion video, both polygonal and live-action commercial segments that reminded me very much of those in Robocop, another campy but fun sci-fi flick.

Headhunter’s pretty solid in terms of graphics, despite being a Dreamcast port. Though lesser in quality than other PS2 adventure titles, Headhunter’s characters are detailed and its environments believable, which is all I can really ask in a game of this sort. Nothing wowed me, but on the whole I thought things looked pretty good. The sound is much better, with bearable voice acting and a very cinematic and orchestral musical score, ironically done by that guy that did that ''Jump Around'' song in Jet Grind Radio.

It’s unfortunate that Headhunter is held back by little amateurish issues; it wouldn’t have been very hard to implement a 360-degree autoaim feature or increase the radius by which Jack would perform a stealth kill on a dimwitted sentry. Some more frequent item placements, a few new toys, and some better-designed puzzles would have worked better as well.

The upside to this is that Headhunter’s strong enough to get away with these little ticks, because when it works, it works. The story, even if somewhat predictable, fits nicely in with the setting and gives some very strong unity between Jack’s job necessities and the missions he runs after meeting his qualifications. There are very few Sci-Fi games that do what Headhunter does as enjoyably, and even with all of its problems you could do a lot worse than to track this game down.

7 / 10
Just imagine how great it would be without all the problems!

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*Must all diabolical creations immediately destroy their creator?

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/24/02, Updated 11/24/02