Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter (PS2)

What makes the game great for me is the seamless transition from space dogfighting to first person shooting. 2 Genres I love. You can be flying through space, manoveure to land into the docking bay of some asteroid, finally land and walk out of your ship and start talking to the person there ready to give you your mission. It creates far more atmosphere like this.

Mace Grifin isn't a free roaming adventure though. You have set missions to do and you do them in a specific order. I suppose if I was comparing it to two games it would be combination of wing commander 3 and half life.

Graphically at times the viewpoints are stunning. You will get surprised by your foes on occasion and its not the easiest game in the world but for me that makes the game better. The difficulty I find means that most of the time you just scrape through with minimum energy and other times you might have to redo a section 3 or 4 times before you succeed. I would say this is perfectly pitched difficulty. As you get to know the layout it makes the game easier.

The game has been heavily influenced by Halo and while its obviously not as technically impressive as halo it does at least never get as boring as some parts of halo. I'm referring to the halo level where you have to follow the ball sized computer around the so called library. Jesus that level dragged where you got constantly attacked by the flood and nothing seemed to change for about half an hour.

The worst things about Mace is definitely the bits where you have a time limit. This means for these sections you end up running past the enemy just to make up time. It ends up with some sort of benny hill chase scene with you running and about six baddies behind you. Not really how it should be played and the time restraint means you can't really enjoy the amazing 3D graphics created for the game.

Another thing is the complete lack of multiplayer modes. This is a single player game and a single person adventure. Thats what it is and always intended to be. I've seen it criticised for this but don't understand why. Many games come out intended for single players and this is one of them.

The end conclusion I have of this game is its breathtakingly ambitious and does the ps2 proud on a technical level. Actual gameplay is excellent almost all the time but some niggles here and there. Sound is generally excellent with pretty good music and excellent voice acting.

If you like first person shooters I highly recommend this game.

With Mace Griffin being trumpeted as a Halo beater I was excited. I shoved the disc in the machine and four minutes into the first level I can tell you that despite it’s obvious merits this game is by no stretch of the imagination anywhere near as technically stunning as Halo. For a start there is little period of atmospheric acclimatisation. It’s all shooting, all maiming right from the outset. While in some circumstances this might be a good thing, here the action just feels totally random and overly frantic and ever so slightly pointless. People are shooting you. But you can’t see them, then you are shooting people and the controller is vibrating, which mixes with the vibration you feel when you yourself are taking hits and it all becomes very confusing and imprecise.

Graphically things look good until you get too close to the scenery, then it looks a bit blurry. Perhaps the PS2’s lack of texture memory lets things down a bit here. I’d need to look at the Xbox version to say for sure. Out and about in the Bounty Hunter's guild things look sparce and slightly bland. While ominous ‘space’ music and noises wash over you some of the textures are overly harsh and garish looking. It starts to feel a bit like 2001 on Ketamine. This is carried over into the levels. Playing the Temple of Virtual Light level I actually started to feel a bit sick until I got used to the ambience.

Despite all this the general game build is very good. The level design is solid and varied (although unlike Halo you never really feel like you are outdoors) with a good balance between (frantic) combat, light puzzle solving and set pieces. The weapons feel chunky and fun and once you find out what to expect in combat you grow to like the game more and more as you wade through the fairly varied tasks and enemies.

Subtle design features like secondary fire, the ability to skip cut scenes and the ability to use your space craft as a sort of base camp add depth to the experience. And the Star Wars Starfighter-esque space combat segments of the game, although feeling slightly tacked on, do lengthen the enjoyment of the experience.

However, once getting past my initial dislikes with the game, then growing to enjoy it, at the end of the second level proper I was once again given a right slap round the chops. Because, I am sorry to report that Mace Griffin is one of those games that insists on giving you annoying time limits to complete tasks. Is there actually anyone out there who likes time limits in games?! They are awful. Developers take note. Rock Star dumped the time limits between GTAIII and Vice City, presumably listening to feedback by games testers. So why can’t others take the hint? No one likes them! Games shouldn’t feel like an exam. We want time to explore, to drink in the detail, to live the locations not to be harried from one place to the other. Don’t try and dictate to us. We get enough of that at work! Ok rant over.

Mace Griffin is a solid and respectable shooter that tries to be many things and succeeds about 50% of the time. Although there is nothing dreadful here there are elements that work excellently and elements that do not work at all. Go ahead and buy this but be prepared for it’s flaws and be prepared to be majorly frustrated on several occasions before you complete it.