Manhunt

"Exploitative trash. *pause* OK, OK, it's gripping, well-done exploitative trash."

Every few months, I read the same old story: Game Companies Can't Understand Why Women Don't Play Video Games. How is this possible? they ask. How can the fairer sex continue to ignore the deep intellectual refinement of our products? If the product in question is Rockstar North's Manhunt, which is currently banned from sale in Australia, Germany, and New Zealand, you'd have better luck selling them on male-male pornography. Suffice to say that the number of women who'd spend time stalking and killing people at the behest of a snuff movie producer is vanishingly small. But for the unfair sex, Manhunt wrings more tension out of evading, stalking, and killing one nameless flunky than most games get out of annihilating legions of undead.

It's like hide-and-seek. With killing.

Good news, James Earl Cash! With the help of acclaimed movie director Lionel Starkweather, you've been saved from a near-death experience (read: your state execution)! Now, if you'll only spend the next few hours using your talents (read: killing people) to do some favors for Mr. Starkweather (read: killing people, on camera, in the most insanely photogenic ways possible) you'll be repaid handsomely! (Read: buried in an unmarked grave in prime swampland.)

You start in the middle of Carcer City, an urban wasteland that Starkweather has rigged with cameras, remote controlled gates, and hunters paid to find and kill you. The biggest issue at the game's start is that there are no wusses here; even the lowliest unarmed thug can punch away a third of your lifebar, to say nothing of what he can do with a baseball bat. Starkweather's thugs do, however, have two major weaknesses:

-They talk to themselves.

-They suffer from Advanced Redshirtitis, meaning that they'll investigate any suspicious noises, even if they're coming from the end of a very, very dark corridor.

And you, being a soulless killer, have two advantages:

-The ability to hide in shadowed areas without being seen. Here, shadow is an either/or proposition - there's no "in shadow when seen from the left, but visible from the right because you're holding a crowbar that's glittering like a Christmas tree."

-The ability to perform extremely impolite instant kills, if you're holding the right equipment, and only if your victim doesn't see you. There are three different kills per weapon that you can perform, just in case hacking through a human being's neck as if it were kudzu gets, you know, boring.

Put it all together, and you get freaky terror. After biting the dust a few times, you'll settle into a "routine": walk along a few yards, meticulously look for any hunters before they see you, and note any shadowed areas the way a man in the desert notes pools of water. Then tap a wall, kick a trash bag, do something loud. If you hear a hunter approaching, hide in the shadows and wait until his back is turned. Then hold down the L1 button to "autostalk" behind him (but dear lord don't knock over any trash cans! And don't walk on gravel!), hold down an attack button (but get it over with before he turns around! or before another hunter sees you!) and release to deliver death with indignity. Cash...wins. Flawless...victory. Fatality.

Oops, it seems two more hunters were also investigating your little found-sound performance. And now they're opening fire. With nail guns.

The operative term at this point is "run for your life".

And that's Manhunt in a nutshell: three-fourths tension plus one-fourth bloody chaos. A lunatic's patience is a must to avoid open confrontations and get the easy kills, especially when you start encountering multiple hunters in the same area - one direct sighting, and they'll be all over you. The hunters' AI is a mixed bag. On one hand, they'll happily ignore fresh bloodstains, chunks of...um...brain matter, or even...uh, skull fragments. They'll even go back to pounding a beat a few minutes after stumbling across the headless corpses of their comrades. Worse, the AI sometimes cheats...on your behalf. Say there's a hunter marching between points A and B, and you decide to hide in a shadowy area between those points, positioned so that he'll walk just in front of you. What will happen instead is that the hunter will stop just before he crosses your position - without "seeing" you - and return to point A. On the other hand, the hunters will often wander around semi-randomly, throwing off your timing. They'll sometimes call for reinforcements if they do find a fresh corpse, and they know enough to stay the hell away from you in combat if they have a gun and you don't. They're not smart, but they're smart enough for entertainment purposes.

As with Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar opted for fast load times (around ten seconds, at the start of each of the game's twenty levels) over graphic quality, and the modeling and texturing can get downright amateurish. "A pile of tires" translates into "five polygons with a spray-painted tire texture" here. But the graphics get the point across: Carcer City isn't just economically dead, it's positively rotting; a blighted hellhole comprised of abandoned homes, decrepit malls, an overgrown zoo, and "For Lease" signs advertising properties that no sane human being will ever inquire about. Cash treads through it like some post-apocalyptic handyman, with the tools of his trade dangling from his belt: nail gun, baseball bat, a few loops of strangler's wire, severed head. A soundtrack of grade-Z 1980's-slasher-flick synths adds to the nastiness. And through the first two-thirds of the game, you'll also be in contact with the director himself, via earpiece. Starkweather doesn't have the depth or menace of a true villain - he's more like a hockey coach who starts dropping f-bombs when his team's doing badly. He does do an amusing running commentary after your kills ("Do you realize just how much money you saved the city's mental health department?") when you screw up ("And now the whole sorry cycle of violence repeats itself") and when he's enjoying the carnage just a littttttttle too much ("Oh my God, I've had an accident! I'm serious man, you brought me off!" - this, after you've reamed through some maniac's crotch with a sickle). I have no idea what sort of horrific financial tragedy befell the British actor Brian Cox that forced him to take this role and play it with such gusto, but I'm not complaining. Your agent may not love you, Mr. Cox, but we do.

It's almost inhumane to mention this, but after playing several games where the user interface seemed to have been designed via dartboard, Manhunt feels sinfully good. With a gentle press of the left thumbstick, you can slowly, slowly pan around to that hunter coming your way, without moving a muscle. A firmer press and you'll creep silently, a full press and you'll walk normally, and the R1 button's for sprinting (loudly). Fittingly for a game concerned with stalking and being stalked, there are several intuitive controls for strafing, peeking, and taking cover. The weapon categorization is a bit arbitrary: there are one-handed weapons, two-handed weapons, one-stealth-kill-only weapons, and bait (bricks, bottles, and...severed heads). You can only carry one of each, leading to a few silly situations where you have to choose between, say, taking either a nail gun that's out of ammo or a knife, but not both.

A few unfortunate things happen between the halfway and three-quarters point of Manhunt: Starkweather goes off the air, the settings become more generic, the white-power crazies and masked psychopaths are replaced with cops and SWAT members, and your increasing reliance on firearms turn the game into...a slightly more interesting TPS. The Grand Theft Auto-esque contrivances also start to pile up. We find out that Starkweather's kidnapped Cash's family for bait (um, OK) and later you spend an entire level escorting a drunk around (huh?) It also becomes clear that the AI isn't going to get much better. You'd expect that the hunters would start using night vision, or go in as coordinated groups, or use their radios more effectively, or get some flashlights that actually work, or just shut up for a few minutes. Even Starkweather's personal storm troopers can be lured into death traps and gunned down, three, four, five at a time, in the space of a few seconds.

Then there's the ending. Midway through the game, I started wondering how this was all going to end; clearly a Death Row escapee receiving the key to the city from a grateful mayor was out of the question. My guess was that Cash would stumble upon Starkweather's pile and vanish without a trace, to be morally rehabilitated in the sequel (where, presumably, he'd battle the other city-controlling snuff-film producers). The actual ending turns out to be even lamer than that - the game just sort of stops, answering nothing except which character definitely won't be returning. Has video game production has become so financially risky that a decent ending is...out of the question? True, this is preceded by the game's traumatizing final stage, where you're unarmed, trapped in a Silent Hill-esque lair, and being stalked by a...thing...carrying a chainsaw. But that's tarnished by being a complete non sequitir.

None of this completely obscures the successes of Rockstar's fusion of the survival horror and stealth genres. New players should start with "Hardcore" mode, as the "Fetish" mode provides a radar scope that gives away the hunter's positions, and reduces much of the scares. (It also serves as a crutch for the Playstation 2's aliasing, but that's neither here nor there.) Manhunt's not an especially replayable game either way, nor should it be. Think of it as the gaming equivalent of a juicy steak that quenches the id once in a while, but that's too unhealthy to consume regularly.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 08/29/05, Updated 09/12/05