SpyHunter - Nowhere to Run

A movie that never got made hangs over this one. Midway had lined up Dwayne Johnson to star in a SpyHunter film, and the tie-in game arrived anyway in 2006 with his likeness, his voice and a plot about Alec Sects and the NOSTRA organisation, orphaned from the picture it was meant to promote. That origin explains almost everything about the design, including the decision that most divided people: the driving stops, the door opens, and you get out.

The on-foot sections are the whole argument. Terminal Reality built a third-person shooter inside a vehicular combat game, with cover-free run-and-gun shooting, a lock-on, and melee takedowns that exist mostly because the star was a wrestler. They are short, they are stiff, and they break the rhythm that the series was built on. The Interceptor's appeal was always momentum, the sense of weapons cycling while the road kept coming, and standing still in a corridor is the opposite of that.

When you are behind the wheel it is closer to the real thing. Oil slicks, smoke, missiles and the front-mounted guns are all where you left them, the weapon van still trails along to resupply, and the car still handles like an arcade object rather than a simulation, which is correct. Objectives cluster into strings of small tasks rather than pure races, so a mission might mean escorting, destroying, or chasing before it lets you open the throttle. The best stretches are the ones where the designers stop assigning chores and just fill the road with traffic to weave through.

It looks its age in a specific way. This is a late PlayStation 2 title built on ageing technology with a licence at its centre, and the environments have the flat, functional quality of a project that spent its budget on the celebrity rather than the scenery. The Rock's performance is game enough, but the script gives him ordinary spy-thriller lines and no room to be funny, which wastes the one asset the game paid for.

SpyHunter: Nowhere to Run is worth a look mainly as evidence of what happened when a publisher bet a franchise on Hollywood and lost the bet mid-production. Under the star vehicle there is a decent arcade driver with a good weapon set, trapped inside a structure that keeps asking it to be something else. Play it for the road sections and treat the shootouts as the toll you pay to get back to them.