Minority Report : Web Wombat: Games

Minority Report was a very intriguing movie - adapted from famed 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' (aka Blade Runner) scribe, Philip K. Dick’s novel.

It had plenty of big budget sets, that cool jet-pack scene and starred the likes of Max von Sydow, Tom Cruise and the ever-refreshing Colin Farrell.

It was directed by (Kingsley's favourite), Spielberg, and the plot was actually pretty cool, too, but let's credit Dick, rather than the Berg-meister, for that one.

Like many Philip K. Dick movie adaptations, the sci-fi setting was truly imaginative, but not so far beyond the realms of reality that it became laughable, either.

The movie turned out to be quite the box office hit, pulling in a lazy $131,917,534; such a result pretty much guaranteed a video game conversion.

Essentially an action-adventure game, Minority Report: Everybody Runs (MR) is set in the year 2054, Washington D.C.

Thanks to a new innovation called Pre-Crime, there have been no murders since 2050. Three psychic beings, known as Pre-Cogs, live in an aqueous nexus and foresee crimes hours before they happen.

The Pre-Crime officers interpret this data and derive time, place and persons, then jump in their hover-gizmos, bust down a few doors and lobotomise the crims before they can do their deeds. It’s the perfect system.

The game begins a little differently to the movie, and doesn’t mirror it scene for scene. You start the game off chasing down crims, who - as the catch-cry goes – always run.

Long story short, the player (John Anderton) eventually sees himself named as a pre-crime suspect, presumably for a murder.

"My Spider-sense is ting... Oh wait, wrong game"

While this makes for a great story and fits in well with the movie, you’ll indiscriminately punch, kick, headbutt, body slam, shoot, bludgeon, maim, kill and gib thousands of people along the way. Not exactly the smartest way to clear your name of murder…

So what can be said about MR? Well, it certainly has the feel of a next-gen video game, but thanks to a couple of oversights in design, it comes unstuck – but more on that later.

Combat plays a large role in MR, and works in a similar fashion to games like Spider-Man: The Movie, which isn’t surprising seeing as it uses a tweeked version of Spidey’s game engine.

Exploration and puzzle-solving play second fiddle to brutality, but in my book that’s a good thing – provided the fisticuffs action is intuitive and fun.

There are two main action buttons that perform strong and quick attacks respectively, while Anderton can also jump and initiate a grab or block, depending on your position.

Combos can be strung together with three or more well-timed button presses, and by collecting money hidden throughout levels, you can also buy more powerful combos (and other powerups) from the Black Market.

While part of the title of the game suggests that “Everybody Runs”, the ebb and flow of MR suggests otherwise.

Sure, the combat engine is rather tasty, and the majority of backdrops are fully destructible to boot, yet you do a hell of a lot more crushing, bludgeoning and demolishing than running.

The Jet Pack levels are a nice diversion and do involve a bit more escaping and so forth, but for the most part you’ll be beating seven shades of crap out of thousands of Pre-Crime employees, robots and angry chefs.

While dispatching enemies is fairly easy, and quite fun, that glaring oversight mentioned earlier can make the game a lot less rewarding.

Anderton's "plan" was flawed on a number of levels...

Simply put, you can use a sliding kick move of sorts to knock your opponents down, and while at times there’ll be way too many baddies around to perform the move, it is nevertheless a ‘get out of jail free’ card.

Rather than play-testing the bugs out of the game engine, it’s almost as if the developers Treyarch, who have a damn-fine track record, just upped the number of fist-fodder thrown at you.

Sure, it is a pretty exciting brawler when you get to grips with the controls, but after several days of non-stop skull-splitting and suplexing, things start to get a little monotonous.

You start to forget about what level you’re in, why you’re there and what must be done – instead you just keep on hammering away at your foes… Tonk… Tonk… Tonk…

That said, one of the more endearing aspects of the combat engine are the après-death moves. If you’re quick enough, you can pick up slain enemies and either pummel them like you would a fully-functional opponent, or you can stomp on their heads and throw them through glass windows, even out of buildings if you feel like it.

But, at the end of the day, pounding cadavers does not a brilliant game make, and sadly, MR comes up a little short.

The enemy AI scripting varies in MR, from being tough and pleasingly challenging, to excruciatingly daft. For instance, you may enter one room, be confronted with three Pre-Crime officers. Two of them may come in close to thwock you well ‘ard, while the third keeps his distance, plugging away at you with his theoretically impossible concussion-rifle.

At the same time, you may run up to two foes standing shoulder-to-shoulder, blocking your escape. You pick one up, throwing him - screaming - down two flights of stairs to his death, while the other guy stands there, scratching his bum.

I guess not much has changed in law enforcement circles…

"Oh my... Your crotch is glowing"

Visually it’s not the best game with which to showcase the abundant power of the current-crop of consoles, but it’s not a total gaff either.

Texturing is pretty average at best, and to be frank, it comes across as a rush job.

The rag dolling isn’t at Hitman 2 levels, but it is fairly cool, and adds a level of gritty, if somewhat grotesque realism.

Other times the rag dolling is not quite so authentic. Arms and legs should be making tasteful cracking and popping sounds as tendons, ligaments and cartilage are torn apart with the pressure of limbs bending the wrong way, yet they don’t.

It’s as if they’ve got multi-direction joints – but hey, it’s damn funny at the same time, and combined with the head-stomping, who am I to complain about senseless violence?

Projectile weapons also come into play during the game and add some rather lovely eye-candy. The consussion rifles look ace, distorting all fields of view around them once discharged. Using weapons and targeting is fairly easy, but a lack of ammo kind of limits their usefulness (unless you cheat – Ed).

While level design isn’t bad, it’s nothing to write home about either: Office block here, futuro-gym there. Yawn.

There are 40 levels in total, but hardened gamers will find the going fairly light-on until the last dozen or so stages, when you’ll be facing multiple enemies in multiple waves on multiple levels.

Attention to detail is, however, a highlight and whether it’s the cutlery and crockery in the kitchen crashing to the ground, or files floating out of a beat-up cabinet, I was often caught with a toothy grin on my ugly mug.

"Speak up, officer! And why are you groaning?"

The motion-capture is very nice and this is one reason why the fighting engine is so functional – that combined with good collision detection and a genuinely solid feel.

The sound is actually one of the better aspects of the game – smashing glass in particular coming off with great clarity. Clancy Brown voices Anderton (Cruise was too busy with his Scientology commitments) and offers much cooler tones anyway.

You enemies also make a number of amusing comments as you dispatch them, many of which would be more at home in an episode of The Simpsons than in a serious sci-fi environment.

While the film was a treat for the eyes, ears and even grey matter, the game doesn’t quite offer the same involvement, when ultimately it should, after all one is interactive, the other is not.

For the ultimate in movie-to-game conversions, The Matrix Reloaded will be the game to anticipate, and while I wouldn’t go as far to say that the Minority Report game is forgettable, it wasn’t the escapist-adventure that I was hoping for.

Still, if you like lots of action, lots of fisticuffs, and some rather gruesome rag dolling, this game will please, no doubt about that.

Game: Minority Report
System: PS2
Players: 1
Memory Card: Yes
Developer: Treyarch
Distributor: Activision

Rating: 70%

(Ratings Key/Explantion)

Minority Report is on the shelves now.

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