The mobile version of Spy Hunter, from THQ Wireless and Alacre, does a reasonable job of displaying the classic arcade game on the small screen. Unfortunately, even though everything looks more or less the way it should, the scaled-down Spy Hunter experience isn't nearly as much fun as the original.
The titular Spy Hunter is a little gray sports car that barrels down an endless highway, turning evil secret agents' vehicles into shrapnel with machine guns and other offensive and defensive weapons. The faster you go, the more rapidly your score will climb...unless you should accidentally perforate one of the many civilian vehicles frequenting the road, in which case the tally will temporarily freeze as a penalty. Weapon upgrades, like missiles, oil slicks, and smoke screens, take the form of a red truck. You have to match speeds with the truck, sometimes in the middle of a firefight, and then guide your car carefully up a ramp and into the back, where it'll get a new weapon installed. Some enemies, like armored cars and helicopters, are impervious to your standard guns, so they must be dealt with using missiles and the like.
On a mid- to low-range Cingular handset (the Motorola V551, in this case), Spy Hunter looks like an authentic duplicate of the arcade game. In other words, the game's 1980s-era graphics aren't particularly notable, but then again, they're not really supposed to be. Although there are a few performance hiccups during play, such as occasional, very brief pauses in the action, they're infrequent enough to ignore. The real problems are with the game's sound and controls. It's disappointing that Spy Hunter is missing the all-important "Theme From Peter Gunn," but this is not surprising, given the capabilities of our test handset. The same excuse doesn't hold for the missing weapon noises and explosion effects, however. The game's controls are also difficult to deal with. They're not precise enough, given that there simply isn't much margin of error when maneuvering around a traffic jam at high speed. Plus, you have to use the entire keypad to drive and access all your special weapons. Furthermore, shifting from low to high gear seems to be particularly difficult.
Spy Hunter is a fair action game at best, and it's sure to frustrate Spy Hunter fans who are expecting an arcade-perfect experience. This product isn't worth the six dollars it currently costs, so most mobile gamers should keep hunting for their mobile action fixes.
