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TheVillage's Spyhunter (GC)
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| [March 5, 2008 07:20:42 PM]
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ENTRTY #2
GAMEPLAY
So I continued on level 3, which turned out to be fairly entertaining. Set in the the canals of Venice, it provided all sorts of carnage and wild jumps. The timer actually is fairly short for each level, usually about 6-8 minutes, so everything is really fast paced and chaotic. This chaos is a main theme of the game design. The first time you play a level you experience this huge onslaught of information and necessary actions that create a very frantic gameplay pace. You must be aware of several different mission objectives at once, avoid dying to swarms of enemies, be careful not to kill civilians, and on top of all that you must do it under the time limit.
Of course, once you have played the level a few times (which is usually required to complete all the objectives) this overwhelming chaos becomes manageable and the levels become fairly repetitive. I had to play level 3 three times, then replay level one (the horrible training level) to get one more objective to unlock level 4. Despite this, Level 4 was almost ,worth the wait as it was a wild swamp level. However I never could complete enough objectives to advance to level 5.
DESIGN
The narrative discourse of this game is pretty underachieving. The first level starts with a poorly rendered movie of a bunch of men in suits talking about their satellites the "Four Horsemen." The heads of a huge evil corporation, these men represent your enemies and you must single handedly destroy thousands of enemies and structures to thwart them. As of level four, which is roughly a third of the way through the campaign, there are no story updates, except small level blurbs that come during the load screen.
The level design is interesting. The designers cram tons of enemies, destroyable props, and interactive objects into the levels. There are always jumps, ramps and secret passages. The levels are fairly linear, which helps with completing objectives, but definitely cuts down the replay value.
I feel this game is extremely limited, and that probably contributed to its relative lack of success. The system of rewards/punishments is extremely painful, it is like instead of making new levels they just decided to make you play each one SEVERAL times. Not the best idea, in my opinion. There isn't a whole lot of emergent complexity or complexity in any form, really.
Overall this game seems like a poor arcade game at best, and at worst like a torturous experience. Ok, so it wasn't that bad.
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| [March 4, 2008 06:06:20 PM]
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SUMMARY
In Spyhunter, you pilot an all-in-one vehicle in fast pace levels, completing a series of objectives.
GAMEPLAY
Having never played this game before, I started on the first level, which turned out to be an extremely difficult training level. Game progression is dependent on a series of objectives that you must complete during the level. For example, for the first level there is a main objective (a slalom course) and five more objectives like minimizing civilian damage, destroying certain targets, etc. In order to unlock the second level (and additional weapons), you must have completed at least 4 objectives. While this method (which is common in such games as the Tony Hawk series) can provide some amount of replay value and player options, I found it rather frustrating. It took me almost 30 minutes just to satisfy the first "tutorial" level since each run through took about 6-8 minutes. Things can get extremely repetitive when you are playing whole levels only to miss a certain jump and fail a mission you need to advance.
Once I passed the training level things started to get a bit more fun. The second level only took me one try to complete all but one of the objectives. The level was very fast paced and consisted of destroying a helicopter. I found the life system fairly forgiving, this is how it works: Once your car (the main form of your spy vehicle) is destroyed from it emerges a motor cycle, and once that is destroyed you die. However, there are repair trucks throughout the levels that take you back to a full health car. This also applies to the water form of your vehicle except instead of a motorcycle you get a little wave runner. So dying and finishing within the time limit were not much of a challenge, but missing objectives that are often hidden or difficult to reach is frustrating. Playing entire levels over is rarely a design method that I feel encourages the player to continue. So thats the first two levels, hopefully in the next session I can progress farther.
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TheVillage's Spyhunter (GC)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Tuesday 4 March, 2008
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