Mace Griffin Bounty Hunter Review

Mace Griffin Bounty Hunter is a futuristic sci-fi shooter that diligently follows in the footsteps of the futuristic sci-fi shooters that have come before it. Though it touts a unique blend of standard first-person shooter action and space shooter action, the game continuously evokes either the general feel or specific elements of other recent futuristic sci-fi shooters. Mace Griffin doesn't quite match the level of polish or inspiration found in the games it draws from, but, on its own terms, the game succeeds in providing a straightforward, if somewhat familiar, experience.

If you can forgive the game's derivative nature, there's an entertaining experience to be had here.

The game kicks off with a fairly significant amount of exposition about the future history of the universe and Mace Griffin's specific situation. However, the picture it paints is of a pretty standard futuristic sci-fi universe where corporations squabble over deep-space mining rights and space crime is a constant problem. When we first meet Mace Griffin, the star of the show, he's a part of an elite force of space police called the Rangers, though shortly thereafter he's framed for the slaughter of his squad and quickly sent to space jail. By the time he gets out, the Rangers have been discredited and disbanded, and the only thing on Mace's mind is revenge against those who set him up. He'll need some cash, a ship, and some guns to exact his vengeance, so Mace goes into the bounty-hunting business. As he takes on a series of seemingly unrelated jobs, he begins to learn more and more about the conspiracy responsible for his incarceration and the scale of its nefarious plans. The story elements in the game feel like they're there for the sole purpose of justifying the action, and there's really nothing here that we haven't seen before.

Henry Rollins provides the voice for Mace Griffin, and his performance here is the very definition of 'phoning it in.'

Each of the jobs that Mace takes on is represented by a large and largely self-contained mission. Though the isolated missions give the story a disjointed feel, the actual action is pretty consistent throughout and generally involves the shooting of lots and lots of pretty generic-looking space thugs. The action is pretty good, but it would unquestionably have been better if the AI were more consistent. Sometimes enemies will become aware of your presence before they even see you, rolling behind cover and lobbing grenades, and sometimes you can walk right up and pump a few rounds into them before they'll even acknowledge you. The game helps compensate by placing enemies in hard-to-reach places, and later on by simply giving enemies bigger guns and making them harder to kill, but the kills would've been more satisfying if the enemies were just smarter.

Mace Griffin also falls back on jumping puzzles pretty often--usually where the obvious path is blocked and you're forced to find a trickier alternate route. These can be frustrating at times, partially because the jumping mechanic is a bit rough around the edges, and partially because the visual clues the game gives you can sometimes be a bit unclear. There are also several limited-time sequences, where you're given a countdown clock to play against as you disable a series of bombs, reprogram a ship's navigational computer, or simply try to get to your ship before the rock you're on blows up. The game assists you in reaching your next mission objective by providing you with a compass that is relative to the area you're currently in, but the compass can occasionally be misleading or not relative enough, and sometimes it simply disappears before you've reached your objective.

As mentioned before, each mission is pretty sizeable, with some of the more epic missions taking almost two hours to complete, and aside from the occasional load times, they maintain a constant pace throughout. Save for the somewhat-funky jumping mechanics, the game controls well and addresses the lack of precision you get with playing a first-person shooter on a console by locking on to a target after you have it in your reticle for a set amount of time. This is certainly helpful, but as the game progresses it seems to become less and less reliable. The set of weapons you'll brandish is pretty predictable, including a standard handgun, a sniper rifle, a minigun, a few types of grenades, a rocket launcher, some energy weapons, and a shotgun that looks an awful lot like the standard rifle from Halo. The game also borrows the armor system from Halo, where you can sustain a certain amount of damage before you'll start losing health, and if you stay out of harm's way for a few seconds, your armor will automatically regenerate.