Cerberus. The army staffed entirely by people prone to blackouts.

When stealth action was really coming into its prime, so too was the 3D gaming experience, so it doesn't seem like it was entirely an accident. Playstation blessed us with games like Metal Gear Solid and Tenchu: Stealth Assassin. Mean games of an excellent calibre, wherein you were often rewarded for intelligence and careful planning more than you were for your standard acts of derring-do. It was games like this that helped me figure out just how adorable the non-FPS genre could be. Through research I would be able to prove to you that I've sucked at First Person Shooters since before they even existed, even before that wizard game that ID put out prior to Doom! Where, I asked, was my niche in video game society?

I know what you're thinking, but it was actually survival horror. All the same, I always thought stealth gaming was pretty neat too.

Manhunt, the makers of which we all know were responsible for your GTA series (of which I was never fond), is kind of like a weird fusion of La Femme Nikita and The Running Man. James Earl Cash is slated to be executed, saved by a mysterious man referred to as "The Director", and told that he has a chance to live if he doesn't mind a few very egregious acts of slaughter between him and his way out. The plot isn't exactly the most original and if you don't have every plot twist guessed just by reading my rather bare-bones description then I'm disappointed in you. It still had my interest kind of piqued and, though it peters out pretty quickly at the end, the plot is practically the only thing of Manhunt that manages to stay pretty stable all the way through.

Manhunt is in the higher echelons where graphics are concerned. It's not something that'll have you on the edge of your chair, but all the character models look great (especially the paramilitary wardogs), despite loss of points for such incredibly frequent repetition. A minor flaw, but a valid one. Also slick, Manhunt loves the grain filter to almost Silent Hill-type proportions. Carcer City, the setting for the 'manhunt', is not a place you'd want to take your family. This is adequately displayed for all to see in the standard style. Broken down cars, graffiti on the walls, what have you. Its like someone took every depiction of an inner city ghetto that they could and transplanted it into Manhunt. Oh, those silly Scots. It might not defy any stereotypes, but at least it looks good while it's doing it.

Sound is also pretty good, though suffering from the similar repetition of the character models. The bad guys simply don't have a lot to say. And it always seems like in the rare instance that a guy has more than three lines to draw from, he's in such an uncomfortable spot that you really don't have the time to listen to them. When a game repeats character models, that's okay, because stuff like that takes time to do. What's the harm in spending twenty more minutes recording dialogue, Rockstar? The worst violation of this is the snarly voice of the Director himself, which will assault you with a group of cliched lines that are, most of the time, exactly the same, or so similar that it barely matters. The only difference between the director's hackenyed sayings and those of some other disembodied voice is the director's libelous use of profanity, the employment of which, contrary to popular belief, does not de facto make something better. I'm all for the conscientious use of profanity to enhance dialogue, but when it seems like every word out of a character's mouth is something that deserves a serious cleansing with some Ivory, it gets a little old. I dream that one day there will be a game that doesn't draw from the same canned source of dialogue for every character of a specific type, a game that doesn't resort to the lowest common denominator to make things interesting. This game is not Manhunt, but, presentation-wise, it's still pretty stellar on every count.

This cutscene was totally awesome, the first twenty times.

In the gameplay, though, it seriously falters. When you first enter the realm of the Manhunt, you'll be amazed. Nothing but a plastic bag to defend yourself against the legion of thugs waiting to claim the bounty on your head. And how many times do you think you could use a plastic bag to kill someone? To be honest, I figure you could use it as much as you want, considering Cash don't really kill them with the bag so much as he does via a broken neck. Ah, c'est la vie. Anyway, you might find your heart pounding as you dart from meagre cover to meagre cover totally defenseless as you look for the next bit of rubbish you might use in your escape. Running around in the shadows, building your slew of killing weapons up from glass shards and lengths of wire to blackjacks and baseball bats is certainly very entertaining, but, after seven or eight levels in you've seen just about all Manhunt has to see. The much lauded "executions" are limited to three per weapon, and I'd be hesitant to admit to there being more than 10 weapons in the entire game capable of producing these limited animations, some of which are just re-skins of other weapons! This is, of course, not including guns. 'Why?' I hear you keen, tears in your eyes. Because guns in the realm of Manhunt are useless hunks of lead. Sure it's a surefire kill from close range with your crackerjack "criminal shooting skillz", but guns do not provide you with stealthy kills (obviously) and, as such, they provide you little points towards your score for the level. Want to unlock some of the extra features Manhunt provides you with? Well you ain't, not with guns anyway!

Which begs the question of why, oh why, are their levels comprised almost entirely of guns? Some might say that this is a break in the monotony, but it feels to me more like a total violation of everything the game taught you over the first half. You're outnumbered, one against an army, here's a machete, now stick to the shadows and pray. It's hard to feel outnumbered when you're taking on six or seven SWAT team members with a sub-machine gun. Maybe that's me, but you shouldn't set up such a great atmosphere of dread for a game and then turn it into a slap happy killing-fest a few hours in. What happened to hiding behind a dumpster with a shard of glass and waiting for one of the guys to split off the group so you could take them out? At some points in the game you're given the option of either, but the gun route will take you two minutes while the stealth one will take you ten. Due to the impractical length between save spots (mostly the lack of checkpoints before really difficult parts), you'll quickly find yourself eschewing that meat clever for a sawed-off shotgun. Such is the life that Manhunt provides for us. The gameplay is perfectly stellar for the first half, and maybe a little more. It wasn't until I spent over an hour in a prison shootout with basically no cover. It's funny how Cash's sharpshooter aim suddenly turns sour when the badguy's ten feet away, standing perfectly still. You'll find yourself wasting six or seven bullets (or more!) on a single baddie while you're downed in a mere three or four shots. Six or seven, wonderful. In the real world, maybe so, but Manhunt will give you four or five bullets from a downed creep if you're -lucky-. Any high school grad would be glad to tell you that that's just an equation that won't work out. I'm glad I'm forced into the run and gun world of the action genre with a health bar roughly equivalent to what you would expect of a crippled, blind, baby. As if to add insult to injury, some of the later levels suffer a significant lack in the amount of scenery one can use as cover. This only further reinforces the idea that the creators totally forgot that they were making a stealth game in the evening hours of Manhunt. The AI is just as schizophrenic as the game itself, sometimes chasing you into a corner and taunting you mercilessly, sometimes waking up after being shot in the neck with a tranquilizer dart and trundling along as if nothing happened. Five years ago it was fine AI for Metal Gear Solid. Nowadays I feel like I'm being stiffed with the robotic movements of these supposedly bloodthirsty killers.

The fat, mentally damaged character. Staple of any explotative game.

And finally, the gore and profanity everyone's talking about. What is the big deal about this? That "they" let them put it in? Who is "they" and why do "they" care? Here's a hint: "They" don't! Nobody cares except the parents of the fifteen year old kids these games are so obviously marketed towards. I really don't see how anyone not in their teens could get really psyched out by the almost pornographic level of violence this game effuses. Look, I'm no conversative here or anything, but the sheer level of gore in this game is just stupid. Watch as Cash pokes out -both- of his opponent's eyes, just to be sure! Cringe as Cash blows his opponent's FACE OFF using nothing but a baseball bat. Uh, what? I mean, it was alright the first few times, but I have to wonder if Rockstar et al realized that they were making a game where you're forced to watch the same boring, repetetive scenes dozens of times. This is not fair, and I'm wholly convinced the only people that this could possibly appeal to are the same young teens that everyone's trying to get it away from.

Go to a GameFAQs message board and look at Manhunt threads, I'll bet dollars to donuts that everyone espousing this game in all its gory glory is below the tender age of eighteen (mentally, at least, if not physically). Manhunt is a solid, but very exploitative, game in many respects that never really manages to mesh together into any sort of viable whole. As you get further and further into it things wind farther and farther apart with no hope of winding itself back together again. You'll be disappointed just as much with the climax boss fight avec porque as you will be with the denouement involving a George Lucas stand-in. One wonders in what universe a man, a celebrity in the public eye, is able to employ a private army. The answer for that, my friend, is simple: It is the ridiculously excessive world of Manhunt, the world I loved for six hours and hated for the ten following that. The world where carrying one severed head on your belt is never enough, just as long as you have a machete.