Spyhunter 2

Super Street Video Game Reviews

SpyHunter, the popular 80's arcade game, got a chance at new life when Midway resurrected it in late September 2001 for the PS2. It went on to become a huge hit, selling well over a million copies to become a PS2 Greatest Hits favorite. SpyHunter was one of the few old-school arcade games that made the leap into modern gaming with great success. Not only did it make it in the gaming industry, it slid right into Hollywood too. Universal Pictures is producing a SpyHunter movie starring The Rock coming to the Ultra-plex theatre near you next year. For SpyHunter 2, Midway worked hard to update the game with new cool stuff, but still keep the whole SpyHunter flavor going on. Much of the significant elements are the same: the car, the agent, and the terrorist group bent on world destruction. Midway just tweaked these elements by adding a little sex-appeal with a female agent, some very cool car gadgets, and a few other features to keep the game fresh.

Agent Alec Sects is back ready to save the world from the hands of the evil crime group NOSTRA. Even though Agent Sects destroyed the major part of NOSTRA in the last title, little did he know there were world-wide operations and fragments of the network starting to re-connect in order to continue their course of chaos to eventually take over the world!

Agent Sects has a few new tricks up his sleeve, most of them belonging to his G-8155 Interceptor. The Interceptor is back with a sleek, slick design and comes loaded with weapons, and features that even James Bond could envy. We all know that a spy can't save the world without his trusty, tricked-out ride, right? Completing missions gets more upgrades for the Interceptor, and some of the nifty features include being able to go off-road, over snow in the snow ski or water in the Jet ski, plus rockets, missiles, machine guns, armor and electro-polarizing shields.

To play, select a mission and start. You can choose to play a one-player game to go through all the missions or you can select one of two types of two-player games. SpyHunter 2 has both a "cooperative" game and "competitive" game. In the cooperative game, Player One controls the car and the offensive weapons, while Player Two handles the secondary and auxiliary weapons. If your not feeling so friendly, then go head-to-head and may the best spy win, because only one can be left standing at the end. Our only advice is to choose your opponents wisely.

Two things we do have to mention are the mission directives and the AI mission difficulty. There are times when the mission directives are so vague that its hard to tell what the goal is at all. Next, and this is a biggie, the AI skill at times significantly jumps in difficulty. Unfortunately, the skill level doesn't seemed to be balanced in steady increments, and players might find themselves screaming in frustration. Not only that, but if you mess up during missions it takes you back to the very beginning of the mission--no matter how far along you've gotten.

On a positive note, the controls are great and the whole game looks dynamic, sleek and just what you'd imagine the glamorous, dangerous world of international espionage to look like. Not only that, with your fabulously sexy, sidekick Agent Duvelle from the International Espionage Agency, nothing is ever that bad. Slide behind the wheel of the new and improved G-8155 Interceptor and take it out for a spin. Besides, what's more important than saving the world, while traveling the globe with a hot, gun-toting chick in your fully armored automobile? Now, you get the picture. We give SpyHunter 2 3.5 nukes.