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"JUST DON'T CALL
IT 'SMASHED TV'" Remember how good "Smash TV" and the first "Loaded" played on the arcade and PlayStation, respectively? Nice little 3/4 overhead shooters in which swarms of enemies attacked you from all sides and your weaponery was the only way to carve a path through the game and completing the levels with a bad-ass boss awaiting; they were, of course, less intense and adrenaline-packed than the overhead shooter to end all overhead shooters, "Robotron". The first original PlayStation title from European programming house Eurocom (best-known for porting games instead of creating them), "Machine Hunter" wants to be in the same company with "Robotron" and "Smash TV" but ends up with "Re-loaded" in the pile of 'forgotten has beens' that never got its many potential elements together. GAMEPLAY / FUN FACTOR: D- (60) The storyline is predictable (the robots mining the colonies of Mars in 2034 are reprogrammed by evil "ID4"-type aliens that make them assemble a new and dangerous breed of killing machines, and you're the only survivor of the Machine Hunters task force sent to Mars to stop them... "Doom" anyone?) and the task at hand familiar enough for anyone who has ever played a videogame before, but "Machine Hunter" utterly failed to prove itself to me in either fun or purchase worth (MGM Interactive will never get my $10, damn it!). There are sixteen levels to complete in the game (passwords required, since there is no Memory Card support), and the only way to do so is by taking control (via your Machine Hunter outfit) over any of the nine different robots in the game and collecting red/green/blue power-ups scattered through the levels to upgrade your primary/secondary weapons; teleporters are also spread at key locations of the levels, and they serve to (a) reach specific platforms and (b) checkpoints in which to continue after you've lost all your energy and you lose a life (a nice touch that prevents the replay of a level from the beginning, always a mood killer). All of the above and the nice flow of the incoming enemies (not as intense as "Smash TV" but not as sparse as "Loaded") would have made it a reasonably fun overhead shooter if it weren't for a control scheme so flawed and unresponsive as to render the game almost unplayable, due to the absurd need to hold the L1 button in order for your character to strafe (something that must be done in order to move around the enemies and obstacles) and a "Robotron" shooting scheme that controls the aim with either the right analog stick or the four PSX buttons (triangle, square, O and X) while you move around with either the left analog stick or the regular d-pad (although once calibrated, analog proves much more accurate than the unreliable diagonals of the digital control). Either way, you're gonna end up dying more times out of the inability to line up your robotic ducks in a row than from ineptitude; throw in an optional difficulty setting and repetitive gameplay, and "Machine Hunter" is as thrilling to play as it is to watch old people f***. GRAPHICS / VISUALS: C (75)
Graphics start out generic (a few flat and unemotional FMV segments of robotic machines going haywire) and they never get beyond average although they move at a crisp 30 frames-per-second, have nice light-sourcing effects for the weapons and feature loads of nice and futuristic scenery for the different levels (prison cells, hospitals, cargo bays... all damp and with pixelated textures, of course!); there are options to have the overhead camera fixed or rotating with your walking perspective, and both cannot prevent the main hero to look like a squashed midget Role Playing Game's Non-Playing Character (or RPG NPC for short! :-P). All characters are sprites, and they look the part: low-res, choppy movement, pixelation, the whole nine yards that even names as pretentous as the WI-1500 MKII and the Centurian VT-200 cannot disguise as cool design ideas. MUSIC / SOUND EFFECTS: C- (72) Music starts as cool and strong industrial techno, and toward the seventh level... well, it still is industrial techno but it doesn't feel strong anymore (not bad, just incredibly generic); sound effects are of high-quality but are limited to the repetitive sound of footsteps, robots and your bullets and other laser-based weapons shooting around and hitting random objects (the ricochet of a bullet hitting a wall is particularly sweet). Not bad stuff, but just not the kind that you'll remember after turning the game off (and hopefully returning it where it came from, be it a Blockbuster rental bin or the Electronics Boutique used games bin). OVERALL: 66
(D+) The only two elements that I will remember from this game are its gross galactic leeches that explode into a pool of blood (in a Mars outer space colony?) and its color manual, which had the ineptitude of featuring the same lame artwork (a guy with two sides painted different) of the cover in each and every page (brilliant!). With stuff like this and its horrendous control scheme, "Machine Hunter" isn't even worth the $10 I paid for it; when I think of the two Super Sized McDonalds Value Meals that I could have had with that dough ...
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