Starsky & Hutch

"Good cops, average cops..."

Intro
First thing that comes to mind in Starsky & Hutch, is that it's bit like Driver, aim of the game is to complete the objectives given to you within given time limit. An interesting concept is the fact that you have shoot a number of targets whilst driving to sustain your ''Viewer points'' for the virtual audience.

Visuals
Graphically it's all there, nice Bay City recreation, nice colors and detail. There is some amount of pop-up in some areas but not enough to ruin the game. There are also some nice cell-shaded like comic cut-scenes.

Audio
Soundwise, all the old classic music from the series plays in the background, shame you can't add your own soundtracks, but then it wouldn't feel the same. The voices of the two cops can be heard throughout the game, like Hutch saying things like ''Check that broad out, foxy lady!'', just as they would in the series! lol

Gameplay
Control-wise, just using the brakes and gas, very straight forward, can seem abit sluggish at times but can easily adapt to it after a few sessions. There are only two camera view, either from behind the car or in-front of the car view, the latter is pretty poor as it shows a big shadow on the road which looks like that of an ice-cream van!

It can take a while to load sometimes, especially when you want to restart a mission, it needs to re-load each time, as it uses the old style streaming method, some points during the game it will pause or halt for a few seconds and show the ''CD spinning'' icon, this ruins the flow of the game somewhat, it shouldn't happen in days of such technology, lazy programming, especially for Xbox - they should of just loaded all the data into the Hard drive and streamed direct from it to eliminate the halts. Also, the pace of the chases is quite slow like your car moving around 30 MPH. There are no replays after a race/mission, so you can't view those chases Driver-style, pity really, seeing as most racing/driving games have replays as standard. It's ironic that as it adapts the ''Viewer points'' concept, you'd expect replays as if you was the viewer, the game seems rather rushed in this respect.

Overall
It's an average game that won't last particularly long, but you will get some amount of enjoyment from it while it lasts, but it should of been so much better though - a definite rent before you buy.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 06/26/03, Updated 06/26/03