Mace Griffin Bounty Hunter Review

Melee weapons aren't generally as useful as projectile weaponry. Especially against a crazed robo-cult.

Heroes of first person shooters tend to be very one dimensional; It’s a case of an eternal struggle against another race, planet or culture and at first viewing Mace Griffin is exactly the same. Formerly a ranger (the galaxy’s ultimate police force), he makes a decision that costs him his career and his freedom for a brief stint. Fresh out of prison and ready for some revenge, he becomes a bounty hunter.

The slight twist on the regular FPS style is that at some points during the game you will enter ships, grab the controls and seamlessly pilot the craft around space engaging in a few dogfights and travelling to your next location. Seamlessly of course doesn’t include the loading times.

Imitation is a form of flattery

The weird and wonderful certainly play a part in Mace Griffin's life.

Halo’s system whereby you have a shield that recharges if it hasn’t taken damage for a few seconds is also used in this game. For a console FPS it works excellently, to give you a safety buffer for each fire fight that you can use without taking damage to your health, especially if you’re having trouble aiming or turning around fast rnough with the joypad controls. Equally, the heads-up display seems to have borrowed elements of Metroid Prime, whereby your information seems to be projected onto the front of your helmet - moving around slightly as you move.

Gameplay wise, controlling your character does seem fluid and appropriate and while the selection of weaponry is pretty expansive, I never felt much of a need to use more than a few of the weapons for most of the time (perhaps due to the over availability of ammo for your primary machine gun). The difficulty curve starts quite steeply, throwing you in at the deep end, but once you’ve mastered the controls, new challenges such as timed sections and tricky jumps are thrown into the midst.

Where do you want to go today?

Space battles are visually impressive, but never feel as truly epic as they could have been.

Being a bounty hunter does throw a lot of varied locations at you. You could be protecting valuable livestock in an offworld farm or on a luxury spacecruiser, or protecting high-class officials and each locale is very distinct and varied in itself. Generally speaking, the missions are fair too - even the normally frustrating protection missions that are the bane of many similar games seem well done here, although whenever a time limit is forced upon you, the feeling of restriction is very pronounced.

Unfortunately, with few exceptions each of the thirteen missions tend to have the same type of enemy throughout the whole of the level, which would be more of an issue if the levels weren’t so different. Enemies do carry a variety of weapons (each of which adds to your respective ammo count when picked up), so fire fights are rarely exactly the same, especially when some also wear shields that stress the importance of headshots. After the first few deaths, you’ll realise that aiming for the head is often just as easy as any other body part and five times as effective.

The seamless twist

Is it the sharp teeth or the fact that they're running towards me that says 'kill, kill them all'?

Piloting your own, variety of, spacecrafts is certainly an interesting addition. Space battles themselves aren’t as stunning as in many space sims, but they do the job, giving you another objective before you can land at certain places (i.e. ridding the area of hostile fighters). It does feel very simplistic, but the mere fact that it breaks up your ground missions and avoids the feeling of jumping from one planet to the next adds a consistency to the whole universe.

As easily as walking up to the controls and hitting the triangle button, you’ll gain control of a ship, while the same action disengages yourself from the stick and allows you to walk around wherever you’ve managed to dock. Simplistic, yes, but very welcome and appropriate within the game style. Graphically, the space battles have some pretty fantastic visuals, at least for the look of space, and while the other effects are hardly stunning, they convey what you expect with some satisfying explosions and projectiles whizzing past.

And the rest…

If it hadn't been for the two hour queue at customs, Mace Griffin would have made his flight.

The rest of the graphics remain at a standard level of PS2 detail, but the characters aren’t especially detailed, which will serve to confuse players at certain moments, unsure at whom to shoot. The levels are detailed enough however, to convey whatever needs to be seen and remain unique in style through the game.

Equally, the sound effects are perfectly adequate, but never seem to elevate themselves over a very standard quality and while many of the lines are delivered decently enough, the various accents used for aliens, etc. certainly raise the odd eyebrow. An occasional bug means that a line that perhaps should have been played earlier is repeated during a cut scene, changing the intended character voice, and at one point confusing me as to who was talking.

An orchestra of gameplay

When you've only one set of clothes, hanging your washing out to dry becomes an alltogether more difficult task.

While most of the music fits well, a certain level of repetition throughout the game left me wishing for a few more variations on themes had been created, but it doesn’t really make the game suffer. It merely adds slightly to the frustration of failing just before getting to a checkpoint and having to work through the easier and perhaps more simple areas of a section before reaching the more taxing part that clinches the segment.

Overall however, Mace Griffin Bounty Hunter is a rather varied and interesting FPS despite a few drawbacks, and hopefully the harsh and simplistic opening won’t put off new players. A Halo killer it certainly isn’t, but ignoring the shield system and the genre, perhaps it’s not even trying to be.