SpyHunter: Nowhere To Run

The first SpyHunter game was a solid game, Point of View did a fairly good job of revitalizing the series for the 21^st century; so it was disappointing when SpyHunter 2 from Angel Studios was less than stellar. So here we are, the third developer doing the third SpyHunter game, but will Terminal Reality have any more luck with the franchise?

The first and most noticeable feature of the game is that it features The Rock, because he’s doing the movie of the same name set to release next year. So, here we’ve got a movie-based game that comes out a year before the movie and it’s not hard to see that an extra year of work would’ve done this game some good.

The story is a non-essential, run-of-the-mill affair, where you play as a James Bond-wannabe named Alex Decker who is, in turn, played by The Rock. As it should be expected, SpyHunter is all about the car, but Nowhere to Run is also all about the Rock and these two things do not mingle well. The Interceptor (that’s the car’s name, yes, it has a name) missions are easily much more fun than The Rock’s generic third-person action missions. As the driving of the Interceptor, you’ll be dealing with fast-paced action that’s mostly fun. You car is armed to the teeth and these missions will make good use of your weapons. All the classic SpyHunter weapons have returned, from the smoke screen and oil slick to the trusty machine guns and missiles. For those pesky enemies at your side, you can hit B and spikes come out of your tires, which will make short work of any enemies who dare try and pass you. One complaint about the driving modes is that moving is too sensitive, making dodging obstacles more trouble than it should be. The vehicle-based parts of Nowhere to Run are pretty good, offering good variety for weapons and for the “shape-shifting” ability of your car to change into a motorcycle or jet ski.

So the vehicle parts aren’t too bad, but it seems that the motto “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” doesn’t apply here. For some reason the addition of being able to go on-foot was included and no shocker here, it stinks. Playing as The Rock, I mean Alex Decker, should be a lot more fun that it is, but it just simply isn’t. Aside from being boring and generic, it’s very slow and offers nothing new or captivating to attempt to draw you in. You start off with no weapons, so you’ve got to resort to melee combat, it’s a good thing that you’ve got that muscular ex-wrestler physique. The A button grabs the enemies and you can also throw them (crummy rag-doll physics will follow), B allows you to roll, X punches and Y is a stronger punch (which is very satisfying, due to the nice crunch it makes), which can be held to stun the enemy and allow you to hit any of the four face buttons for a wrestling finishing move. Since the AI is so absolutely brain-dead, you can do a stun punch and a finisher pretty much all the time. If you get bored of your melee combat, there are your usual assortment of guns, including pistols and machine guns. The gunplay is all right, although shooting anywhere, but the head offers no indication of a hit and it takes a bit of time to take someone down with body shots. Clicking the right thumbstick offers a slightly more zoomed in form of aiming, but movement slows to a crawl, so it’s something that definitely needs to be used sparingly). Unfortunately, also like the vehicle modes, the aiming is too sensitive, it’s either too fast or too slow, but with the awful AI, it shouldn’t present much of an issue.

Nowhere to Run has barely passable graphics, The Rock looks like The Rock, but everything else is mediocre. Poor quality textures and ugly, generic level designs run rampant throughout the game. It’s not a terrible looking game, it’s just about as generic and average as you can get. The sound in the game doesn’t fare much better, Alex Decker’s one-liners are just plain lame and the sound effects are music are also generic. The majority of the voice acting is wooden and uninteresting, making you want to skip the cutscenes even more.

Generic, boring, average, mediocre, all are fitting words to describe the mostly uninteresting adventures of Alex Decker. The driving parts aren’t as well done as they were in the first SpyHunter game, or even the classic arcade one for that matter. The on-foot missions are a waste of time, offering nothing even remotely intriguing about them. One nice feature is that the game is forwards compatible with the Xbox 360 (it was before it’s release, so I guess that’s something to be proud of), so you can now play one of the most average games in upscaled high-definition - please try and contain your excitement.

I know Terminal Reality is capable of better, both BloodRayne games had much better third-person action than this and they didn’t have a superior driving mode to fall back on. SpyHunter: Nowhere to Run definitely needed more development time, because as it is, it’s just another generic action game, only this one has The Rock in it.

Gameplay: 5.7
Vehicle combat is fairly nice for the most part, albeit a bit too twitchy. However, the third-person “The Rock” mode is like the inclusion of guns and other playable characters in a Sonic game, it’s just a bad idea that hurts way more than it helps.

Graphics: 6.0
It’s average, just plain old, boring average. Nowhere to Run doesn’t look visually appealing in any way and the generic environments don’t help either. Aside from the pretty good looking model of The Rock, everything else is a just a notch above bad.

Sound: 6.3
Wooden voice acting, cheesy one-liners and generic sound effects and music, yep, more average work plagues the sound department.

Difficulty: Medium
Some parts can be challenging, but there’s nothing here that’s too challenging and retrying doesn’t hurt you, in fact, it does the opposite as your health increases slightly if you die.

Concept: 5.2
Why, oh why did they add such a lame on-foot mode to a SpyHunter game?! Not only did they include such a lame mode in a driving game, but also it’s something that you end up having to trudge through way too much of. I also fail to see the logic of bringing out a movie-based game with no sign of the movie around.

Overall: 5.5
SpyHunter: Nowhere to Run can be summed up in one word; average. It’s not a bad game, it’s not a great game. It has some bad ideas and some good ideas and they’re all executed in a mediocre fashion.