Manhunt

"Interesting ideas but it's a bit too slow and repetitive"

I'm trying something a little new with this review, no longer will I rank each aspect of the game with a number out of ten, I feel I can be more informative simply by telling you what the game plays like. This is the system I'll always use in the future unless something better comes along.

I have a feeling a lot of people are curious about Manhunt. What is it about? What does it play like? Is it any good? Sure I know that anyone who came into this review is obviously doing so either out of curiosity about the game or alternatively because they're bored and want to read something. However I think Manhunt is one of those games that people are more curious about than others when they see it on a shelf at a store or rental chain. As big as the advertising was when it was released it's kind of rare to find someone who actually owns a copy. With this review I hope to help clarify what the game is really all about and what you can expect from it.

Graphics
The graphics in this game are not really very good, they aren't bad either though. Areas all tend to be very dark and ugly, however seeing as how this oppressive atmosphere is totally intentional I can't find too much fault with it. My biggest issue though is that the blood and gore isn't nearly as good as I think it could be and this is a game that was intentionally made to be extremely violent. A lot of the game tends to look the same, with a few exceptions the game takes place in abandoned old buildings and areas. An abandoned zoo isn't that much terribly different than an abandoned warehouse or an abandoned prison. I mean it's all just dark, broken down and grayish.

Sound
Take it or leave it, the sound is pretty average. The one exception is the hunters though who say all kinds of weird crap like how their boots are poorly made or other such things. There are also several subsets of hunters and each has their own set of quotes. The hunters do repeat themselves a bit but it takes a while before they do. The one thing that annoys me about hunter lines though is that they rarely show the fear they should when they find the mutilated bodies of their buddies and they haven't seen or heard anything else to indicate an intruder.

Gameplay
This is obviously the most important element in any game and I'll be blunt, Manhunt's gameplay is flawed and repetitive. I'm not saying it's terrible but it certainly isn't one of the better games for the Xbox or PS2. At its core Manhunt is a stealth game, it's mostly sneaking around and hiding. You hide in shadows much like in Splinter Cell the difference is you're always either hidden or not and there's even an icon to let you know, this removes a lot of frustrating guesswork but also some challenge.

Sound also plays a role and you'll make different amounts of sound based on what you're walking on and how fast you move. The radar shows you how far the sound you're making projects outwards, if a hunter is in the area that your sound is projecting in he will either get suspicious or notice you based on if you are hidden or not. Enemies make sound too when they move or talk and unless they are doing so or you have a line of sight on them they don't appear on the radar so it's kind of like the motion tracker in Halo but more refined. You can also punch walls to intentionally make sound and the hunters wont see you in shadows unless they either see you enter that shadow or they bump into you, therefore most of the game is just a matter of luring a guy over to investigate and then killing him once he turns around to leave. If you do get discovered you'd do best to run because the hunter will call over his buddies and they'll beat, slash and shoot the life out of you in a hurry.

Where Manhunt really differs from other stealth games though is that the goal is not to complete objectives or to get from one point to another (although the latter plays some role) but instead the goal is to kill, kill and kill some more. In fact most of the time the game wont even let you proceed until you've killed every enemy in an area. Like I said earlier the areas are drab abandoned places, during the game you'll never see the light of day since it all takes place in the late hours of the night and the early hours of the morning. The levels themselves are linear although they tried pretty hard to keep it from being painfully obvious, personally I'm glad about that because the game has a slow enough pace as it is without throwing in a thousand switch puzzles. Granted there are switches you have to pull along the way but they serve as merely an excuse for you to go through a certain set of rooms, once you reach said switch it's simply a matter of pressing it. Such objectives appear on your radar so it's simply a matter of heading toward a brightly colored circle and killing anyone along the way. Most levels as I implied earlier have no real objectives beyond killing though.

The way you kill is to sneak up behind an enemy with a weapon and initiate a brief scene of Cash brutally killing said enemy, these scenes are called “executions” which is a fairly fitting term. It gets a bit deeper than that though because the longer you stay within execution range while holding down the execution button the more vicious the execution and the higher the score you get, in total there are three levels of execution. The weapons used are fairly varied but not as creative as you first may think. The first weapon you pick up for instance is an empty plastic bag. Watching a man kill another man by means of a plastic bag is fairly interesting, seeing him slit a someone's throat with a piece of broken glass is pretty cool and watching him jam a crowbar into the top of a guys skull is priceless. However as soon as the expected weapons start appearing, things like knives, axes and so forth it stops being nearly as interesting. Added to this is the grim reality that there are FAR more hunters in the game than there are weapons so you'll see everything several times over. I felt kind of like a junkie in a way while playing this, every time I got a new weapon I couldn't wait to try out all three of it's executions but once I had I just kind of got bored with it and wanted a new weapon to play with. That's really the flaw in the execution system, they just aren't interactive enough. When I play a total gore fest I want to be the artist behind that gore fest, Psi-Ops gave me this but Manhunt doesn't.

About halfway through the game firearms are introduced, this is both good and bad. By this point I was getting pretty sick of slinking around and killing everyone from behind. While guns do not appear in every level after their introduction they do appear in more than they don't. Gunplay is accomplished by a locking onto an enemy and shooting at him repeatedly, the closer you are the more likely you'll hit and the more damage you'll do. Some guns are more accurate than others but the general rule is that if you shoot at guy who is a hundred feet away he'll probably move for cover and evade you and if you shoot at someone a few feet away you'll automatically get a headshot instantly killing them and thus even though you have a gun being stealthy is still a good idea. A really annoying omittance is none of the guns have executions, I really have to wonder why they don't since I could think of some pretty cool ones involving the shotgun or M16-A2 right off the top of my head. There aren't any explosive weapons either. The last important thing I can think of about the weapons is they come in different classes, there are one time use ultra silent weapons like the glass shard or plastic bag, small weapons like a cleaver or handgun and large weapons like the baseball bat and shotgun. There are also distraction weapons you can throw to make noise and attract an enemy or to stun one long enough to run away such as bricks and severed heads. You can only carry one weapon of each class at a time too which forces you to use a bit of strategy, sure you can pick up both that shotgun and pistol but if you do and you end up needing to kill someone silently from behind later you're only option will be a one time use weapon if you even have one.

The gameplay is interesting enough but I have to warn you that it is ultra repetitive, you'll be doing the exact same crap over and over for the twelve to fifteen hours it takes to finish and I was ready for it to be over a little more than half through. At two different points you'll have escort missions but all they are is a simple matter of stashing your charge in a shadow while you clear an area so it ends up being the exact same except you'll have to retrieve your human luggage before proceeding.

Story
While I personally don't see storylines as an integral part of a videogame having a good one is definitely a plus, the storyline of Manhunt is fairly interesting but I don't think it fulfills it's potential. In a nutshell this director guy uses the abandoned bits of a burnt out old mining town and death row inmates he procures from it's corrupt legal system to produce snuff films. For those of you who don't know snuff is a kind of pornography in which people are raped and killed, oh and yes there are really people who get off on that crap and it is a real thing. However I doubt most snuff is real since making an authentic snuff film would involve filming first-degree murder and then selling video evidence of it. So anyway this director guy gets ahold of a man named James Earl Cash and puts him in his little arenas which are populated by various “gangs” of hunters that each have their own fetish/theme, these range from insane dudes to soldier wannabes and much more. The job of these hunters is to kill the people the director sends into the arenas for sport, bounties and the production of the snuff itself. The impression is given that usually it's just normal people and it's nothing but a total slaughter but the director seems to be trying something new with Cash who he has selected with the belief that he'll be able to beat the hunters at their own game thus creating high quality snuff in the process. He intends to just keep using Cash like this until he is either killed or until Cash gets to a certain point after which he'll just have his personal enforcers/bordergaurds dispose of him. Cash is not surprisingly unsatisfied with this arrangement and plots to escape and seek his revenge.

Sounds pretty cool huh? However there are a lot of problems with it from my perspective. First of all over the course of the game we learn absolutely nothing about Cash himself. Why is he such a badass? What was he sentenced to death for? Did he do it? What were the circumstances? Cash is an interesting character who often seems almost feral, it would have been interesting to see the life such a man walked that so perfectly prepared him for this manmade hell. All I could figure is that he must be ex-special forces and most likely SEALs due to the way he fights. Also near the very end of the game you'll be involved in a boss fight of sorts with a person that even less is explained about. Let me say that this boss is a total freak and he really should have a backstory to match. After that and a little bit more killing the game ends with a good deal of finality and even a bit of satisfaction but also a major abruptness and a painfully short ending. The ending would have been a perfect place to disclose a lot of the things I mentioned but that opportunity was wasted.

Replay Value
Very little, there are cheats and pictures with descriptions of various things to unlock but I had no desire to unlock them. Due to the game's repetitive nature I'm not sure I would have finished it once if it was much longer than it was. The way you unlock things is beating the levels in a certain amount of time while getting lots of higher level executions. The pictures and information you unlock are pretty to look at but don't really tell you much. As for the cheats you have to play it on hardcore difficulty to get them in which you have no radar. That's just plain unfair as far as I'm concerned because the enemies would still be able to find me via sound but I wouldn't be able to find them nearly as effectively, it would therefore turn it into a big memorization fest and those are never fun. Besides why unlock cheats to use in a game that you probably aren't going to want to play through twice?

Overall
It's a good rental, that's about what I can say for it. Manhunt seems intent on offending, however being the angry, cynical and somewhat violent malcontent I am it didn't offend me and the shock value wore off fast. Even if you think you might want to buy it I strongly suggest you rent first. If you've ever watched a movie like alien and wanted to feel what it was like to be the alien lurking in the shadows ready to pounce and kill unsuspecting morons it's an experience worth trying, sadly it just lacks any real lasting appeal for me and I don't think I'm alone in that.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 10/26/04