You know, I've come across a couple of these over the years.
Updates, sequels, reinventions, whatever...for Spy Hunter, the 1983 arcade classic.
There was a 3DS game in 2012, which sucked.
There was one on the PS2 and Xbox in 2003, which wasn't great either.
It's a series that just can't seem to get any traction.
And if The Rock can't get you traction, you got a real problem.
So this is one of those things that makes so little sense, it makes perfect sense.
Take a franchise people haven't cared about since The Iron Sheik was WWE champion, and
for no apparent reason, add The Rock.
It's so ridiculous, so bad, I can't help but love it.
It's unthinkably stupid.
You do wrestling moves to bad guys and then drive cars from a Transformers movie.
This is popcorn gaming at its best and worst.
Mostly
the worst, though.
Nowhere To Run tries to reinvent Spy Hunter by basically taking everything that's awesome
about it...and interrupting it, as often as possible.
There are missions when you're driving a car and blowing sh*t up, and they're actually
kind of awesome.
There are missions when you're driving a boat that can blow sh*t up, and they're actually
kind of awesome.
And then there are missions when the car turns into a boat in midair, and continues...to
blow sh*t up.
And those are actually really kind of awesome.
So what do you do with the awesomeness?
Oh, throw in a bunch of on-foot missions that completely ruin the flow and kind of control
like crap.
I mean...what were they even thinking?
Sorry, IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT THEY WERE THINKING.
To be fair, the melee stuff is kind of awesome.
In that "so bad, it's good" kind of way.
Rocky can stun his enemies and then do one of four wrestling moves to finish the job.
And they're actually moves from The Rock's real-life move set, which is very cool for
wrestling fans.
I had fun just bashing these fools.
They're all shooting at me with machine guns, I'm just throwing down the Rock Bottoms.
No matter how bad the controls are, that's pretty sweet.
But you know...those controls are pretty bad.
Clunky as hell, and a great example of unnecessary complexity.
There are 20 different buttons for 20 different actions, none of which happen easily or smoothly.
And I'm not sure I've ever played a game with worse shooting controls.
They're set to inverse by default, like this is f*cking Star Fox or something.
And even when you fix them, it's still slower than Slippy Toad.
But really, the biggest problem is that the game just isn't made very well.
There are plenty of technical issues here.
From godawful hit detection to godawful cut scenes to godawful textures...it's like they
spent all the cash on Rocky's paycheck.
Then again, Rocky is the only thing that makes the on-foot missions interesting.
If this were a generic guy, I wouldn't even care.
But it's The Rock, so.
This one's for the "High Chief" Peter Maivia.
If this whole game were the driving sections, it would be kind of awesome.
Even as terrible as it is.
But all these shooting missions and on-foot crap—it really drags things down.
The wrestling moves are cool, and they animate well...but it's the pace.
When you're driving, it's fast and frantic.
When you're not, it's slow and boring.
Kind of makes you wish there really were...Nowhere To Run.
Big thanks to our friend Nikolas from Long Beach, California, for sending it in.