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GameSpot editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
OK
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 09/15/2006
- Released on: 09/05/2006
- Originally published on GameSpot: Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run (Xbox) Review
Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run is a bit of an anomaly. It was developed as the game tie-in for a motion picture inspired by the Spy Hunter franchise, with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson starring in both. As of this writing, though, the Spy Hunter motion picture is nowhere to be seen, making it seem arbitrary that Midway would release a new Spy Hunter game featuring The Rock. Even if it weren't saddled with all this snake-eating-its-own-tail distraction, Nowhere to Run is such a derivative, uninspired mash of third-person action and driving sequences that it still feels unnecessary.
The last two Spy Hunter games concerned themselves with taking the dynamics of Midway's classic driving-and-shooting arcade game and updating them for modern audiences. Some of the work from those games still comes through in Nowhere to Run, but surprisingly, you don't spend very much time behind the wheel of the tricked-out Interceptor vehicle, which takes a backseat to loads of generic third-person action. You play as Alex Decker, an agent working for the frankly named International Espionage Service, and the driver of the Interceptor. Within the first few minutes of the game, the Interceptor gets stolen out from underneath you by the predictably sinister criminal organization NOSTRA, and much of the next several hours are spent trying to recover the Interceptor. Even after you recover the Interceptor, though, you still end up spending the majority of your time walking through nondescript corridors and shooting at generic thugs.
Despite bearing a passable resemblance to The Rock, Alex Decker has a whole lot more in common with Halo's Master Chief. His health bar will regenerate to a certain extent if you can avoid damage for a few seconds, and he can carry only two weapons at a time, regularly forcing you to decide between machine guns, submachine guns, shotguns, and rocket launchers. When he runs out of ammo, though, Alex can throw down with his bare fists. He has a couple of different punches, as well as the ability to pick up and toss enemies; but all of that might as well not even be in the game, thanks to a suite of WWE-style finishing moves. By holding down the strong punch button, you can perform a stun punch, which leaves your opponent dazed, at which point you can tap any of the face buttons to perform the finisher. Since there's no recharge time on the finishers or the stun punch, you can just perform these two moves over and over again. Even though the artificial intelligence is pretty stupid, often facing the wrong way in the middle of a gunfight or simply not reacting to your presence at all, it often makes up for that stupidity with sheer numbers, and the actual gunplay doesn't feel entirely bad. The fistfighting, though, just doesn't seem very well thought out.
There's usually some kind of secondary objective of planting explosives or rescuing injured IES agents during these third-person action sequences, and there are a few sequences in which you have to man a turret or solve a couple of simple logic puzzles, but mostly you'll be concerned with walking into rooms filled with henchmen, killing all the henchmen, and moving on to the next room. With the exception of some really stubborn spider tanks that you'll run into later in the game, and two suspiciously similar boss fights, there's never much variety to the villains you'll be fighting, or to the action itself. In occasional short stretches between these standard action-man sequences, you'll actually drive the Interceptor, a versatile vehicle that, when the situation calls for it, is able to take on the form of a car, a boat, or a motorcycle.
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Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run (Xbox):
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