SpyHunter 2

The first thing worth knowing about this sequel is how much it wanted to be more than a car with guns. The 2002 SpyHunter revival on PS2 was a fairly faithful modernisation of the old Bally Midway arcade idea: drive the G-6155 Interceptor, shoot the bad vehicles, call in the weapons van. SpyHunter 2 arrived in 2004 from Angel Studios' successor team at Midway and tried to widen the premise instead of sharpening it.

The most visible change is that you are no longer confined to the road. Missions give you two agents, Alex Decker and Dean Palmer, and some stretches have you leave the vehicle and fight on foot. The vehicle side still has the Interceptor and a motorcycle, and the weapons loadout remains the point of the whole series: machine guns, missiles and other hardware you can swap in as the situation demands. The conversion between car and bike is a nice touch, but the on-foot parts are the weak link. Shooting is stiff, aiming is clumsy, and these sections feel like they were added because the sequel needed a bullet point.

The driving itself is where the game still earns attention. Cars have weight, the camera sits behind the vehicle in the manner of the era's arcade racers, and the pace is quick enough that a mission can turn from a calm chase into a pileup in a few seconds. It is also uneven. Mission design swings between clever escort and pursuit setups and plain repetitive demolition work, and some objectives are laid out in a way that punishes you more for the layout than for your own mistakes.

By the standards of a hardware generation that often confused scale with depth, this is a recognisable case. The ambition is real, and so are the seams. Played now, it is a decent window into how Midway tried to keep an old arcade licence alive without quite knowing what to add. The best moments are the ones where the car is simply doing what the series always promised, and the worst are the ones where the game forgot that was enough.