copyright © Jedo Dre 2011
Manhunt
Rati ng:
Impact: Memorable
THE GAMEPLAY
Raw, uncut, bloody, pure and violent to the core Manhunt is a painting of a rotting
pile. It’s the blood dripping from a rusty metal pipe. It’s the hatred of the blood-
Hours ago you were putting up a few last angry and pointless struggles, as a cleansed
syringe, one of the society’s many public servants, had seemingly administered a
lethal dose, putting you into an eternal sleep for whatever anti-
You begin your journey unarmed, and you must improvise weapons from the things you
find around you. Shattered glass and ropes will be your friends at first. They won't
be reliable friends, as they shall leave you after just one usage. As you advance
through the hatred and sickness of the night you will find (or pick up from your
dead enemies) multi-
On his journey, our escapee James Earl Cash, will encounter interesting and diverse
enemies, some sane and some not at all. Most of them though, as the voice tells you,
share one thing with the main character: they are all scum. Under some of their masks
seem to lie overfed faces of the general public coming from normal homes and normal
families. This you can extract from the self-
The enemy is in their majority, and you make little chance face to face against more
than one of them. The only successful method is to stab them in their backs, picking
them off one by one. Stealth is the answer. Shadows will become your castle. The
noise and the light will become your enemies. The shadow-
The storyline is fairly interesting. Although your objectives usually consist of just getting somewhere, sometimes the “director” throws a few interesting missions, like the saving of your family members who had been taken hostage, or escorting a bum through the enemy territory. Once you complete those objectives, the director usually opens the door to the next level. At the end of each “scene”, as levels are called, you will be given a rating affected by your time and the amount of violence.
There are, however, a few strange leaps of logic in the game’s storyline. First,
what is Cash doing listening to this guy who wants him to go up against armed psychos?
OK, at start maybe the director guarantees freedom in exchange for some entertainment,
but when that turns out to be a lie, when the Starkweather’s personal SWAT team beats
the living hell out of him and brings him to a new snuff-
AI is quite remarkable. It doesn’t fully follow the pattern of the other stealth-
AI has different states of alertness indicated by different colors of his icon on your HUD’s radar. Enemies become alert when spotting their dead mates (wouldn't you guess?), hearing suspicious sounds or spotting you from far. When suspicious, the enemy can be pretty stressed out and might start shooting in the direction where the noise came from. Some enemies run away when they understand that you’re more of a match for them than they had originally anticipated. Some don’t even come to investigate a sound you made, commenting that they aren’t that stupid to be lured in. Quite intelligent are these chaps, one might say. During shootouts, however, the IQ of these thugs drops, as they all line up to emerge from the same corner to be shot by you. So, in the end, whether the AI is a leap forward or a leap backwards is up to the player to decide.
PERFORMANCE AND BUGS
Manhunt has a few bugs that are important to point out. The first one relates to
the collision system. There are things placed to be knocked over (either purposely
or accidentally) by the player like barrels. When these barrels are knocked over
they do not rest, and instead keep bumping around continuing to make noise. In that
noise lays another problem. Those of you who played GTA San Andreas might’ve experienced
a hardware related bug when certain sounds caused the game to stutter badly. The
problem would disappear when the generic sound was turned off. This problem is back
to haunt some of us in Manhunt and is extremely annoying in combination with the
dancing-
On the brighter side, Manhunt runs quite fast on low-
VISUALS AND SOUND
Visually Manhunt does not stand out on the market of its time, even though the PC
version looks somewhat better than its console counterparts. The character animations
aren’t top notch and remind the clumsy movements in the Rockstar’s GTA-
Music is extremely sinister, mixed with the main character’s own heartbeat and creepy sounds, it creates and unforgettable atmosphere. Chopping flesh sounds realistic and so does the gargling/screaming. It makes one wonder whether the people from Rockstar actually saw a few snuff movies. The voice acting is the best I’ve heard in years and the “director” deserves an Oscar for, not only for his video work. The guy actually pulls off a few jokes that are funny, and we know games aren't very good at trying to be funny.
THE VERDICT
I’ll quote the game and say that “To best experience Manhunt you should: turn off the lights, close the drapes, lock the door and get ready to kill”. That Lionel Starkweather character did his job well. Manhunt makes for a good snuff movie. It might be controversial when it comes to violence, but many people make the mistake of thinking that Manhunt is just a game that went too far in violence to capture the consumer’s attention, and otherwise posses little value. That’s not true. The game is interesting, original in almost every way and simply is a good game, as long as you can overlook or escape some of its bugs. Just don’t let the young kids play it… but who are we kidding; we all know they will play it anyway.
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