Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run Hands-On
We climb into and out of what is allegedly the world's most sophisticated spy vehicle as we get our hands on Midway's next Spy Hunter game for the first time.
If Midway's long-running Spy Hunter series is known for one thing, it's the Interceptor vehicle that players have been using to hunt down enemies on land and water since 1983, when the game first arrived in arcades. That was six years after James Bond took the controls of a Lotus Esprit submarine in The Spy Who Loved Me, of course, but the fact that the Interceptor could transform from a sports car into a speedboat and back again in an instant made it one of the most desirable arcade automobiles of the era. In recent Spy Hunter games, the Interceptor has gained the abilities to function as a motorcycle or Jet Ski after one of its more conventional forms takes a lot of damage, but it's only in the upcoming Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run that the Interceptor's doors can be opened so that you can climb out of the thing. We recently had the opportunity to do just that while checking out a demo version of the game at a recent Midway event in Los Angeles.
The Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run demo at Midway's event included a handful of levels from early on in the game that afforded us an opportunity not only to put the Interceptor's various forms to good use, but also to pursue bad guys on foot--The Rock style. That's right, folks. In case you haven't heard, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is now the face of spy hunter Alex Decker, not only in the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions of Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run, but also in the movie of the same name, which is expected to hit theaters sometime in 2007. Johnson is known to enjoy video games, and he's certainly no stranger to lending his likeness and voice talent to them. He appears to have taken things one step further in Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run, though, and our time with the game left us wondering if we were playing as The Rock rather than as a character portrayed by him.
After racing through a brief driving level that tasked us with destroying armored vehicles on the streets of Paris, we climbed out of the Interceptor for the first time and put The Rock through his paces as he came under fire from a helicopter circling above. The on-foot controls in Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run are standard third-person fare, with the left analog stick being used for movement while the right stick is used to look around and aim weapons. The requisite forward rolls, crouching, and ability to lean against walls are all present, as are a number of melee attacks--many of which wouldn't look out of place in a wrestling game. There's nothing wrong with a government agent throwing punches and sneaking in the occasional head-butt, of course, but learning that Alex Decker likes to incapacitate enemies using gorilla press slams, spinning back fists, and other moves that have likely been given names by the WWE at some point definitely came as a surprise.
When playing as The Rock, we attempted to spend most of our time using ranged weapons, but they were actually less effective against many of the enemies than the aforementioned punches, head-butts, and wrestling moves. The enemies' artificial intelligence was definitely lacking in the work-in-progress version of Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run that we were playing, but it was still quite satisfying to take out an enemy in a high window while leaning around a wall on the ground, or to corner an enemy before tossing him a grenade. The camera zooms in to give you a Resident Evil 4-style over-the-shoulder camera perspective when using ranged weapons but keeps its distance from the action the rest of the time.
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- Midway
- Terminal Reality
- Mission-based Driving
- Release: Sep 5, 2006
- ESRB: Teen
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