Manhunt Review (PS2)

Age Rating: 18 (BBFC)

Is it fun?
Once you get past the first few levels.

Is it worth the money? £12.99 from Amazon
Only because it’s cheap now!

Why?

Manhunt? What – isn’t that game a bit old? Yeah, you wouldn’t be wrong. But is it any good?

Well for one thing it isn’t scary. I was expecting some sort of Silent Hill level of jumps and scares, but the game is more comical shlock than edgy terror. The game premise is simple enough; you play a convicted criminal on death row, who at the last minute is pulled from the electric chair and dumped into a kind of ‘Running Man‘ scenario where you must kill your way past gang thugs to gain freedom.

From early pre-release hype I wrongly got the impression that the game involved you trying to record killings like some sort of snuff movie. Well, really all that happens is that when you perform a special kill (think Metal Gear Solid sneaking up from behind but with shards of glass/baseball bats etc.) the in-game camera just shows the kill in close-up.

The gameplay at its core is pretty much lifted from Metal Gear Solid with lots of sneaking about and hiding in shadows – and as such its actually pretty damn good (well not a patch on MGS of course, but not bad all the same). But you need to get past the first 3 or 4 levels (just after the zoo if I remember correctly) to really enjoy the game. The early levels suck both in terms of visuals and design.

A lot of elements let the game down unfortunately: Ropey-looking enemy characters that look lifted from GTA, weak early levels, some awful cutscenes, excessively nasty kill cutscenes that get tedious quickly, some enemy line-of-sight bugs, sometimes a LOT of patience is needed to get through levels, crappy dayglow obvious highlights on item pickups and the final boss encounter is rubbish.

Some good things are: Most of the later levels are good fun (wait till the enemy get torches on their guns!), basic core gameplay is good, it’s a BIG game and it’s so old that it’s cheap now!

In conclusion, it’s a decent game but you have be tolerate a fair amount of duff bits to get to the good stuff. One for the determined only! (I only played through it because it was related to a job interview)

One Comment