Chase: Hollywood Stunt Driver

"A very good start."

The main problem with this game is that it screams Rushed. It’s a very good start to what could have been a great game. There are a lot of things to like, but for every plus, there’s probably a minus. Which one you give more weight to depends on how much you paid. I’m writing this from a positive point of view because I found it for a good price and have been having a blast with it.

There are you two ways to play this game. You can play to get to the ending, or you can play to get the best-looking replay for each scene. The longevity is at least doubled if you’re a fan of the latter. If you’re playing to get the best-looking replay it’s doubtful you’ll finish the game in six hours and you certainly won’t be resetting your vehicle. I would restart if I smacked a wall too hard even though that certainly wouldn’t have kept me from completing the scene and in the process discovered that the clapboard – which keeps track of your number of tries (nice touch) – maxes out at 99. I’ve definitely seen movies with worse scenes than what I’ve saved. Some of my better moments are knocking over a fire hydrant where the resultant rush of water flips over a cop car and breaking through a window, doing three donuts on a motorcycle and driving up a ramp, all without so much as a pause in my momentum.

Wondering where the problem is? To trigger explosions and other environmental interactions, you need to hit certain marks, which are designated by mini-clapboards. Until you collect them all. Once you collect them all – which is one of the goals of every scene – they no longer show up. So if you didn’t pay enough attention to exactly where they were you’re down to guessing when you go back and try to get a better-looking replay. They also tend to blend in some stages, so an overview of the scene would have come in handy so you could get a better sense of the layout.

The graphics are a mixed bag, though even at their best they’re not straining the Xbox. Chase’s car looks good (self-shadowing is a nice touch), the frame rate is solid, vehicles can be shoved out of your way (or exploded if you hit them hard enough), there’s plenty of objects to smash through, and pretty much everything that you can’t smash and isn’t larger than your car you pass through unscathed. The graphics – and pedestrians – have a lot in common with Wreckless. As a side note, I was impressed that Chase actually steers hand-over-hand. On the down side, the motorcycle shadowing is broken, Chase is completely rigid in her seat (how about adding a five-point harness?) and she looks like a mannequin on the motorcycle (how about adding a helmet?). The opening FMV is certainly nice. Hopefully that was farmed out though, because otherwise the time would’ve been better spent cleaning up the game.

There isn’t much to say about the challenges (mini-games). They’re obviously tacked on and unfortunately quite broken. The problem with the bus jumping one is that they give you infinite tries. If you don’t exercise some self-restraint and drop back to the menu when you miss a jump the high score board will represent the number of jumps completed until you simply got bored. The stunt challenge – where you do flips off of ramps – is actually quite fun, but they completely messed up the high score chart. They give you the option of playing for 1-, 2-, 3-, 5- and 10-minute periods. Unfortunately, there’s only one high score table, so once you play a 10-minute round, well, you can do the math.

This review is written late in the game, so anyone thinking about picking this up is looking at it being at *least* half off. The other (two) reviews describe the game well enough (though the loading is closer to 10 seconds the first time you try a scene and 3 for a re-try), so I won’t re-hash them. The gameplay is solid, but there are more than a few niggles and at the very least each vehicle should have been used twice (an extra scene in each of the first two movies, two in the third and three in the fourth). There’s definitely fun to be had here, but how much will depend on how highly you value the replay and how grating you find the annoyances (which likely depends on how much you paid).

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/06/03