Spy Hunter (PS Vita)

Pretty much from the get-go, Spy Hunter’s 2012 reboot gives you the exact kind of action you’re hoping for from a spy-themed driving game. In the tutorial level the game goes from teaching you the basics to immediately unleashing high octane insanity on you, explosions going off all around you, car crashes between enemies displayed in slow motion, and even a segment where your car hits the water and transforms into a speedboat. An exhilarating opening to be sure and one that gets you pumped for what might lie ahead, and then you play the next mission and it all happens again and again, some of its novelty lost as it slowly sinks in that maybe the game does need more than explosive action to hook you long term.

 

Across over 20 missions with a few extra side missions to try if you’re looking for more content, Spy Hunter certainly doesn’t skimp on the energetic gameplay it presented to you early on to reel in. Every level will have you focusing on driving forward down long roads, some of the settings reused across missions but there is still a decent amount of variety to be found in terms of the road layout. Part of it comes from the frequent branches, most missions allowing you the freedom to pick which split in the road to pursue without missing the main objective. Some of these even will activate your car’s transformations, the speedboat of course an impressive shift in play as water is far more open to movement than roads but also tends to have shorter segments with fewer enemy vehicles. Off-roading is closer to regular driving despite your vehicle shifting to a configuration similar to a monster truck, the game seemingly less afraid to let you go on dirt roads since it’s not much of a break from the focus on tight lanes where enemy cars can better accost you.

While out on the road you have a few tools to use such as a boost that can send you flying forward but once you let go it will need to refill the missing amount before it can be used again, management of this important in the speed-focused stages. You are allowed to have four weapons loaded into your vehicle for a mission, your car able to gradually unlock new options for certain parts of the car. Front firing machine guns are such a reliable tool it’s hard to justify replacing them, but if you do want a stronger tool you can eventually get a railgun that charges up a single piercing electric blast that should wipe out most enemy vehicles provided you can line up the shot. The flamethrower out of the back is a great way to keep enemies from tailing you and the camera view of your driving does adjust to better help you use weapons that hit things behind you, but laying mines can potentially hit foes who aren’t riding on your bumper. Electric shockers on the side, homing missiles, a mortar launcher, sawblades that bounce off guardrails, and other weapons will gradually join your arsenal and you can figure out which set of four you like best, some missions even having midpoint stops at a weapons truck if you want to rearrange which ones you’re using. With some having limited uses and others recharging when not in use you can plan out a balanced arsenal, but some like the mortar do feel like they won’t see much use since the alternatives are too flexible in handling foes. Completing missions will also reward you research points based on how well you did and any subobjectives you completed, research points letting you upgrade your weapons to be even more capable. By avoiding damage and completing a mission in time you’ll get a research point boost, but you can also wipe out special Comms vehicles or use your touchscreen scanner to snap a shot of black boxes for some points too.

 

The touchscreen does see some gimmicky use like activating your vehicle at the start of each mission but also gives you a few new tools as well. You can unlock a shield you can activate to avoid damage briefly, but touching the screen in the middle of driving at high speeds and fighting foes is a bit easy to forget as an option. The scanner also has a spot to tap if you want to gather intel on enemy vehicle types, although you’ll always be driving the same Interceptor vehicle throughout the adventure with paint jobs purchasable with research points your means of aesthetic customization.

 

There’s a fairly small set of unique vehicles to face in Spy Hunter, the enemy cars working for a mysterious organization that hopes to steal the prototype G-6155 Interceptor vehicle from you to gain access to its incredible array of gadgets. Enemy vehicles will focus on one type of attack such as ones with spikes on their tires trying to badger you from the sides, ones with built in mortar launchers that will lock-on if you don’t deal with them, and truck that drop bombs out the back for you to weave around. Planes will join them with some regularity and fewer of your weapon options can target them, but the boats tend to just be less capable aquatic versions of some of the basic land vehicles you’ve fought quite a bit already. In fact, it can take a bit before the game roles out a new enemy type and usually it will be something similar to what you have faced before, a car with a flamethrower turret different than one with a chaingun on top but not in terms of how you treat it. Luckily, missions often only take a few minutes to beat and thus you can make your way forward to new missions and ideas fairly quickly, and the game actually has a pretty solid difficulty level where you can expect to be wrecked if you don’t diligently destroy the opposition. Those short level lengths and some mid-level checkpoints allow the game to play rough and its a bit more interesting for it, especially when level conditions do try to distract you from battling for your own safety.

Spy Hunter’s levels do contextualize its forward driving action with some fairly diverse goals even if a fair few can be boiled down to trying to get to a place in the right amount of time. When you’re chasing after a car with a nuclear warhead dangling out the back you’ll need to avoid shooting it for example, the player technically just needing to reach the destination but enemies can lead to you almost hitting the warhead by mistake. One level covers your car with acidic poison that drains your health meaning you have to play things a bit safer to survive to the end while simultaneously mixing in some speedy driving so you don’t wither away. Needing to destroy enemy cars in a certain amount of time or avoiding aerial bombardment via satellite laser again add some appreciable variety between stages that do mean the game isn’t just leaning on constant explosions to impress you or the slow motion shots of you wiping out an opposing vehicle. In fact, this could have very well kept the game consistently fresh despite the wearing down of the high octane visuals through overexposure, but a few concepts aren’t quite solidified to the point they need to be to keep the game fluid and consistently fun.

 

The driving controls in Spy Hunter aren’t fully there, and in a game where you’re constantly driving under time pressure and with enemies frequently trying to attack you, this can become a small issue. Your turning is a little bit loose, and while usually you won’t be needing to make quick turns, when you are getting battered by enemies you do start needing the kind of quick and precise movement options that instead lead to you turning too deep and making yourself more vulnerable instead. What makes this a little weirder is your car’s surprisingly low weight, it not uncommon to see it doing a few flips if hit just the right way. Some automobile aerobatics could add to the over the top presentation, but it doesn’t feel like it fits well with how the action controls. A few other weak additions come in the form of the moments you aren’t at the wheel of the car. While the constant driving could use a nice break now and then, the gadgets the game gives you for non-driving sections are all underwhelming. Hop on a turret and you’ll be usually be firing at a single thing that drives towards you at a time, firing a grenade if your bullet stream doesn’t look like it will wipe out that single incoming bogey. Activate your vehicle’s UAV and you can fly ahead down the road to mark targets for air strikes and satellite lasers, but it’s so straightforward you’re just clicking on the few targets available rather than thinking about what you’re doing. A guided missile section has you flying it around barriers and obstacles to hit the target in a few missions near the end and these are again pretty straightforward, albeit touchy control sticks means you might just bump a wall anyway and have to retry the shot. The basic action can blend together a bit, but its these deviations into shallow ideas that dampen some of the excitement, Spy Hunter better off leaning into its bombastic car battles even if it’s to a somewhat mild effect.

THE VERDICT: Explosive car battles with your transforming vehicle give Spy Hunter some inherent excitement across every mission but it’s a formula that needed more support to evolve beyond simple entertainment. Your weapons do allow for engaging with a fairly small variety of enemy types in constantly shifting ways and the objectives for each mission at least reframe similar goals well enough to avoid absolute stagnation, some challenging fun to be had across its short stages. However, popping on a turret or marking targets with your UAV is rather dull and the driving controls aren’t as smooth as they could be, but some extra objectives to earn more upgrade points still give you something to focus on during a mission other than the latest shape of racing to the end and blowing up every enemy in your path.

 

And so, I give Spy Hunter for PlayStation Vita…

An OKAY rating. A lot of Spy Hunter sounds pretty cool when described. Racing up a bridge and avoiding oncoming trains as you’re pursued by well-armed enemy vehicles does provide a good dose of excitement the first time it happens, but it appears a few more times after with a few slight shifts to not be an absolute retread. Things that do start off fresh and impressive will crop up again and lose some of their thunder in doing so, the missions having some surface level variety in their objectives but not enough to really shift up how it’s played too much. Shoot a specific enemy more than usual, avoid shooting something, drive faster, watch out for a specific danger, these ideas lightly bend how you play and that’s enough that short and snappy missions don’t lose their shine, but it does leave you itching to see some more innovation. Your somewhat loose control over the car is thankfully not too often put to the test and thus only an occasional bother, but the moments where you are using something like the guided missile are surprisingly tepid and a bit too basic compared to finding ways to utilize your built-in weapons. Not only can you customize the weapons in terms of upgrades and which ones are equipped, but only a few enemies like the planes demand certain weapon types to damage so you can pick if you want to drive alongside a foe to hit them with side weapons or if you might want to hang back and pepper them with long range fire. Already there are usually small stretches of quiet while driving to let you cooldown a bit after a surge of action and hopefully understand the distorted voice of the main villain as they taunt you, so the variation for variation’s sake with the UAV and turret probably could have been put aside in favor of expanding the enemy variety, especially when it comes to the brief boat sections that only really get a battleship fight to shine as more than flashy side roads.

 

Spy Hunter provides some quick and energetic play that can be rather exciting and decently difficult in a quick dose, but the design doesn’t really receive enough shake-ups over the course of its many missions and the new ideas it does attempt sometimes slow things down a bit too much. Still, blowing things to bits with your built-in weapons is always at least a bit thrilling on a primal level, so while you will find yourself wanting more than slow motion explosions from it, the game does at least do a decent job providing those if you just want a swift surge of adrenaline from being behind the wheel of a super spy’s souped-up car.