Mace Griffin Bounty Hunter

"An ambitious game that's somewhat generic"

Welcome to the world of Mace Griffin. You play as Mace, bounty hunter out for revenge. You have been wronged by something -- maybe the system or a corporation -- and you're out to set things straight. Your playground in this futuristic first-person shooter is space, complete space. The game takes place 800 years into the future when mining is big again. Certain planets have been revealed to have precious materials and, as a result, corporations such as Tannan have seized the opportunity to reap the rewards. Human miners must live amongst and co-exist the Jaldari and Valleakan races or else.

The game itself starts off with a bounty mission gone bad. The ship you're on is boarded by some hostiles and when the smoke clears you're accused of a crime you did not commit. You serve 10 years in prison and the game officially begins after this. Mace will pick up different jobs throughout the game. Most revolve around, you guessed it, bounty missions. But it's not as shallow as it might seem. Sure you'll have to kill a main character from time-to-time, but there's always objectives in between. For example, you may have to retrieve something or find an alternate route.

MGBH feels a lot like Red Faction for a few reasons, with the biggest being that the levels are gritty and take place in huge mines. Mace has a shield system akin to that seen in Halo but different since it can't regenerate an infinite amount of tim. The guns you wield throughout are surprisingly your run-of-the mill stuff even though it's 800 years into the future. You have a few plasma-type weapons but nothing too flashy. As you progress you do get better weapons, and they're spaced nicely. This means that you won't see all of the weapons two levels into the game.

For the most part the gameplay is solid. While it's basic, Mace controls well and the different functions on the weapons keep things interesting while on the ground. But in space, things are another story. See, MGBH is not *just* a first-person shooter. It usually has space scenes before and after each mission (and often in the middle of a level). The problem is not necessarily that the space missions are weak (and they are), but they're too darn frequent. Because of this, the game is dragged down, kicking and screaming, by some needless space missions. Let's say you finish off most of a level and one objective requires you to board your ship and take down enemy ships. Well imagine this being tedious, long, and repeated dozens of times throughout the game. It doesn't end at that, because controlling the ships is damn near impossible at first and you never really get used to it. The ship controls feel unnecessarily overcomplicated. I wasn't a fan of space missions before and this game surely didn't change my mind. The only positive thing that I could possibly say about the space missions is that they're seamless with the ground missions. Space missions are the only major thing wrong gameplay-wise, unfortunately. But they are the worst. Another problem is how the game seems dragged out. It's like they took 10 to 15 hours of gameplay and forced it to be 25 or 30.

Even still, the game lends ultra-solid gameplay that will allow most to forgive the horrible space missions. The gritty environments remind me of something out of Duke Nukem 3D even though they're nothing alike. The textures are low resolution throughout but I'm willing to bet an Xbox to PS2 port is the main culprit. There's a lot of attention to detail, though. The environments are huge and sprawled with all kinds of neat objects and foliage. There are countless graphical glitches along the way but nothing big enough worth mentioning. The blood effects are downright badass and many will love this game just because of them. Enemies will blow up when near explosives in a gooey mess!

Speaking of explosives, the sound effects aren't too bad either. As far as they go, this game won't be winning any awards. But since Henry Rollins did the theme song and is the voice of Mace himself, we have something to work with. Mace is a quiet guy and doesn't overreact to situations like most videogame heroes tend do, and Rollins made this somewhat believable. And the theme song that I mentioned before is well-done. When I first heard it I thought "how dumb is this?" and skipped it. But after hearing a few times and remembering the words it became rather catchy. Now I like it, heh.

The game has a mere one mode: singleplayer campaign. There is nothing to unlock nor is there a multiplayer mode, something which is a sin to not include in a first-person shooter. So after you beat it that's it. I can almost guarantee that you will not play this again. With that said, however, there is one saving grace and that is the lengthy campaign. You will not be beating this in a few sit downs because it's so long and is often hard. Even though you can adjust the difficulty, the AI is cheap enough to give you a challenge. And believe me you'll notice the cheap AI.

MGBH is quite an ambitious game. The game was once being billed as "Grand Theft Auto in space". This is a boldface lie and or exaggeration, however. This hurt my opinion of the game since I hate GTA in the first place, but this game is nowhere as near non-linear as the GTA games are. You'll go through the linear campaign over a period of time and odds are you'll have fun. But just expect terrible space missions and dumb enemy AI along the way. It has its share of high and low moments, but in the end MGBH can only be recommended to the first-person shooter fan that needs something decent to play.

Gameplay: 7
Graphics: 6
Sound: 7
Lastability: 6
Overall: 7

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 08/03/04