First Impressions: Who says you need Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg to make a short story a multi-hour entertainment experience?
With the recent release of the Spider-Man movie, some might remember that game that’s been sitting on the shelf for a while from Treyarch – Spider-Man: The Movie. I know I certainly did. And to my surprise, upon checking out their website, it seems they’re working with yet another movie license. 20th Century Fox’s rather lengthy hit summer movie, Minority Report, is coming to the X-Box, and looks like it might actually translate well into a game. Who would’ve figured – a movie license that actually plays well?
Based on a modified Spider-Man engine (And it shows), Minority Report: Everybody Runs is (obviously) based upon the movie’s storyline, and presents the player with an action-based adventure – featuring a hand-to-hand combat system much like Spider-Man’s, not to mention the addition of a few cool weapons and some uber-amazing futuristic technology, this game has the potential to be one sweet buy. Then again, it could turn out like the last Bond game, with a few cool gadgets but an otherwise bland game (Though Nightfire looks to be ready to remedy that, but more on that in another preview). The hand-to-hand system will let you chain moves together to perform some cool looking combos, with over 20 different combos available (Some can be obtained via “unofficial” connections, as the black market will be making an appearance in the game as it did in the movie). You’ll earn money as you progress through the missions, so you’ll be able to… “acquire” certain things through the pause-menu.
The game, like Bond did, features some “vehicle” missions of sorts – like the jetpack scene, for example. Hopefully these won’t be the only highlights of the game, but then again from a technical standpoint the game’s pretty impressive – for instance, following in Unreal Championship’s footsteps, the game features realistic physics that have the characters’ bodies reacting realistically with their environment – throw them into a wall, they’ll hit and slide (or bounce) to the ground with their limbs laying in a way which interacts with the environment, rather than in a preset death animation. You of course can take advantage of this and use opponents as human shields – something that not too many other games include as a feature (short of Dead to Rights and BloodRayne).
Like Spider-Man, Minority Report is told to have some storyline elements that differ from the movie to make for a more game-oriented experience. While the overall the goal parallels that of the movie, you’ll go through different areas and actions than some of those that you might have seen in the movie. However, the movie’s length looks to have been proportionally recreated in the game – somewhere in the range of 40 levels are going to be present, which is certainly nothing to shake a stick at. The game’s levels are also generally a good size, with the tweaked Spider-Man engine readily able to churn out large environments without losing much in the way of frame rate or visual quality. The sound too should be better than decent, since the game’s surround-sound capable and will likely have loads of sound bytes from or resembling those in the movie.
