Midway's recent release Spyhunter: Nowhere to Run is the third installment on the current gen consoles, unfortunatley, the third time is not the charm for this title.
New to the series is the abiltiy to take super agent alex decker, voiced and modeled after dwayne, the rock, johnson, and venture out side of the interceptor for some third person shooter and melee action. And while drving around the interceptor shooting and blasting at just about everything in sight is still fun, it's nice to finally get to see and play the man behind the wheel. But, the sluggish controls and a poor camera in this mode help quickly diminish the games over all score.
The effort was there, decker has the agility you would expect of any modern day super agent...Shooting, dodging and even pulling off some nice finishing moves. The rock even did his own motion capturing for the in game animations. But, the overall level design and gameplay is so basic, running into one room, clearing out the enemies, perhaps arming a few bombs with a simple button push, and move on to the next room, that you'll find yourself zipping through the game at a very fast pace.
Yes, there are some nice touches, like the ability to pick up nearby objects and use them as weapons or the grappling and wrestling moves decker can use against the sinister nostra agents, but it's nothing we haven't seen before, still fun and sometimes satisfying, just not very orginal and i usually found myself looking foward to getting back to the interceptor.
It appears that every weapon and gadget is back, but new additions such as the tire spikes are fun to use and the new salvo mode which slows down the action allowing you to select multiple targets in a set amount of time is a welcome additon.
You'll still find yourself launching off of ramps for mid air vehicle transformations, which is always cool and the action never lets up. The framerate holds pretty steady at 30fps but that shouldn't be a problem becuase clearly the game is not using a lot of processing power for graphics. They are not awful, but the bar has been set by so many other devlopers on this current crop of consoles that's it's a bit dissapointing not to see that same level of polish from the folks at terminal reality, the game's developers
Spyhunter: Noweher to run is not an awful game, it just a title that lacks the production values and polish we've come to expect at this stage of the uh, game.