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It’s almost always amusing to see game makers try to revamp the coin-op glory days on newer systems. While Midway has had some success upgrading the Spy Hunter franchise, Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run is likely to be proof that maybe some games are better left to memory. Starring everyone’s favorite pro-wrestler-turned-action hero, the Rock, Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run is a moderately comical wreck of a game that provides unintentional entertainment.

He’s a spy… who hunts, see?

Take the role of Alex Decker (played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson—whose name explains his workout habits), a secret agent extraordinaire on the hunt for the evil NOSTRA Corporation. Out to steal government secrets and hardware, NOSTRA has set themselves up for a butt kicking after they stole the Interceptor. The Interceptor is, of course, the familiar Spy Hunter car, armed to the teeth and capable of transforming into a boat and even a motorcycle.

The fun of this series has always been wanton vehicle destruction, and while this latest version does have vehicular mayhem, developer Terminal Reality made a fatal detour.  Since you can’t have a big name actor like The Rock in a game without letting him strut his big guns, Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run allows you to get out of the car. By trying so hard to expand the game beyond its roots, Terminal Reality went off the entertainment highway.

These foot missions are a dreadfully ordinary series of bad stealth, tolerable fighting, and simple objectives. It’s hard to argue that playing as Alex Decker doesn’t have some diversion value. His rough and tumble wrestling/street fighter style is hilariously brutal, as he punches, kicks, pummels, and tosses the girly NOSTRA soldiers around like dolls. The combat is easy, and the accompanying sound effects are good enough to make these segments passably enjoyable, but overall they don’t add much to the core of Spy Hunter gameplay.

B-Movie Vehicular Assault

Aside from combat, the Nowhere to Run locations are a bland array of typical action movie locales—a submarine, a carrier, labs, etc—and there’s almost nothing memorable about the Decker levels. Put together with a series of poorly done, usually extraneous cinematic levels, the whole production smacks of filler material. Lips don’t even move during the movie sequences, and segments that could easily have been interactive are played out far too often in non-interactive B-movie style.

The more traditional vehicle parts are decidedly better, although not even as engaging as Midway’s last attempt. Since so much of the game focuses on clandestine locations filled almost entirely with bad guys instead of the open road, the game feels like a distant cousin of Microsoft’s Blood Wake—only Nowhere to Run isn’t as much fun.

There are plenty of chances to transform at least. The game has a lot of boat levels, and the occasional motorcycle levels add a hyperactive and twitchy variation to the game. Unfortunately, the enemy AI is almost non-existent, and Nowhere to Run relies more on numbers than tactics to hit you.

Guns! Guns! Guns!

The presentation of Nowhere to Run is also lacking. The graphics have a muddy, soft look, and the movies are a grainy, low-res mess. The voice acting is the usual barely awake, phoned-in performance that movie tie-ins seem doomed to receive, although the sound effects are adequate.

Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run does at least try hard to include all the familiar elements gamers remember from the classic original. Drive-in weapons trailers will replenish your ammo, and the armory at your disposal is impressive. The Interceptor comes equipped with machine guns, missiles, torpedoes, cannons, turret guns, tire spikes, smoke screens, and oil slicks, among other neat toys. You can switch between weapon loads to suit the situation, and while it’s fun to play with all these cool toys, the rest of the gameplay just doesn’t stack up.

Don’t Smell What Midway is Cooking

Despite all the flaws, Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run does have a distinct guilty pleasure to it. The plot is hackneyed and poorly executed, the voice acting is lousy, the graphics mediocre, and the gameplay is entirely standard. Yet for all that, this is the video game equivalent to a straight-to-video B-movie: it can be entertaining in spots, even though you know the whole is painfully lame. In the end, unintentional humor and a love of breaking backs and vehicular homicide aren’t nearly enough to make this game recommendable. We can only hold a futile hope that the movie is better.

Article by: Jason D'Aprile
Video produced by: Jonathan Solin