Smuggler's Run 2: Hostile Territory

THE BAD:
repetition and bad enemy AI prevent me from giving this game a perfect 5

SUMMARY:
Ever have one of those days when you just wanted to hop in your speed buggy and tear-ass across Russia while delivering weapons for some evil corporation? Okay, probably not, but the game is still fun nonetheless.

Smuggler's Run: Warzones is coming out for the GameCube soon enough, so I decided to try out Smuggler's Run 2: Hostile Territory to try and get a feel for the series. Ignoring some of the bad reviews I've seen, I went down to the local blockbuster and picked up a copy, all of a sudden thrilled to be able to play the part of a nameless criminal working for a larger organization.

Wait... don't I already own Grand Theft Auto III?

Anyway, so SM2 is no GTA3. it never claimed to be, and it never tried to be. In this game, you're put in the position of a professional smuggler who (here's a shocker) smuggles things. You've got to get in your vehicle, drive around, and pick stuff up and put it places.

Doesn't sound fun? Play it.

I got a rush from this game that I never got from any other. I don't know if it was the speed, the feeling of being a criminal on the run from the law, or what, but I got this intense feeling of joy whenever I picked up the controller.

Now, you probably want me to talk about the graphics. So I guess I will, but not for too long. Now, some of you will look at the close detail and think "hey, those vehicles aren't that great. this game sucks. I'll play Gran Turismo now, but with one hand completely up my ass." But think about what you get when you sacrificed detailed vehicles. You get expansive, detailed environments, with views that stretch for miles on end. Very nice

Gameplay can get repetitive at times, with the goal of "go from here to there and take this that way" becoming commonplace, but at least they did that well enough that it never gets boring. At least, it hasn't yet for me. All the time that you're doing this, you've got cops and other criminals after you, and you don't like them.

Enemy AI is positively dreadful in this game. The sole thought of the police jeeps and buggies and ATVs is "hey, if we crash into him, it just might stop him!" Well, maybe not the guys on the ATVs. "Hey, if we crash into him, we'll fly off these stupid little 4-wheelers and land in front of him. He couldn't possibly r-*SPLAT!*"

The video in this game (the live action video, that is) tends to be rather grainy, and suffers from an overall lack of quality, but then, that could've been intentional

all-in-all, if you're not a hardcore fan of this kind of game, just give it a quick renting. I don't think you'll be dissappointed.

THE BAD:
Where do I begin? Repetition, poor graphics, repetition, no mission development, repetition, annoying audio, lousy controller configuration options, did I mention repetition?

SUMMARY:
This is the worst game I have played on the PS2. The graphics look as if they came from a PS1 game. The vehicles look ok, but the surrounding landscape is fuzzy at best, and the people walking around look like shadows rather than real people. Maybe I'm spoiled by GTA3...

There is no mission development what so ever. You simply drive to a location represented by a yellow dot on your map, pick up a package, and then take it to a red dot on your map where you drop it off. All the while other cars are crashing into you. This goes on level after level and there is absolutely nothing more, unless it comes late in the game and I never saw it as I got tired and quit after completing 15 or 20 missions. The game really is like a bad B-rate action flick. There is no storyline and you simply drive around being smashed into.

The only good thing I can say about the game is every 8 or 10 missions or so, you do manage to get a challenge. The final mission for each "level" is a double mission and fairly difficult, however, all the missions in between are a bit of a joke and easily beaten in 1 or 2 tries...3 max. The final mission in and of itself is a bit of a pisser when you first find out because your boss-Major something or another (I call him Major Jackoff because he never does anything besides tell you what a loser you are every time one of the computer cars crashes into you) anyway, he doesn't tell you in the mission brief that there are 2 parts to the mission. You simply find out once you think you have finished and are about to be able to save, but rather than the mission complete window coming up, it just tells you to go pick up another package and the countdown clock gives you more time.

One of the biggest problems I had with the game was the controller configurations. I've been playing console video games since before the first Nintendo so perhaps I'm set in my ways. Since the first Nintendo came out, I've used the D-pad to control the movement of "my guy". Be it a 1st person shooter or a driving game. I don't like the little joysticks that are on the controllers these days and the only option is to use the joystick to steer the car in this game. Seems as if the game designers were a bit full of themselves on this one IMHO. I mean, they like to use the joystick, therefore, everyone else must like it too. Right? I don't think so.

There were countless other little details/bugs that I hated about the game, but I won't go into them because it would require a novel making War and Piece look like a newspaper personal add.

Ok. I lied. I will go into one more detail that really bothered me about the game. In some missions, when you bring the last package back to the red dot on the map, the game will tell you that you have to lose all the computer chase cars before you can return to base. Now the number 1 silly thing about that is that the red dot never represented your "base". It was simply a location on the map somewhere. Second and more importantly, your vehicle isn't equipped with any weapons to speak of. Each vehicle gets a special weapon, 2 of which are speed burst (useless in destroying another vehicle), another is land mines (about the best for this, but somewhat difficult to use since it normally does a good bit of damage to your own vehicle as well), and an oilslick (I don't know how well this one worked because the vehicle itself wasn't well suited to complete any of the missions). So that leaves you with one option. Drive around in a circle somewhere close to the red dot and hope the computer cars run into each other or into trees and explode before your time runs out. It just seemed dumb to me.

Bottom line - I now know why Smuggler's Run 2 was still on the shelf at Blockbuster when I went to rent a game Sunday evening and all the other games on my list were out. Everyone else knew Smuggler's Run 2 sucked and didn't bother.