Stuntman for PlayStation 2

Stuntman is a repetitive game. Stuntman is a repetitive game. Stuntman is a repetitive game. Getting the picture?

I really, really wanted to like Stuntman. It had the promise to be the year's best game. You play the part of a psychotic-looking stuntman who is called upon to do all the car stunts for various films. Sounds great doesn't it? Only as a stuntman you'd probably be allowed to do test runs in real life. Sadly, in Stuntman, the game, you not only don't get to do test runs, but there's no training or tutorial levels either. You're thrown straight in at the deep end. And the deep end is pretty deep.

Here's how the game works : you're strapped into your car, the counter counts from 3 to 1 and then the director starts barking instructions into your ears. You're allocated a fixed time to do all the stunts in a sequence, and a shorter fixed time to complete each individual stunt. Fall short on either of these times and you're reset to the beginning of the chain. The chain of stunts gets longer the further into the game you get, so that you end up with 15 or 20 stunts in a row to do, and if you fail just one of them, you're out, and back to the beginning. This is where it gets extremely repetitive. The whole 'chain' thing isn't clearly explained anywhere either. So for the first half hour, I was doing perfect handbrake turns into the appropriate yellow box and wondering why I wasn't getting anywhere. I always ran out of time and I never got any points. It was only when my wife spotted the green arrows on the wall after I'd spun around for the umpteenth time that I decided to drive over and take a look. Aha! There was another stunt. So that was the key - you don't get points for any one stunt - you have to do them all before the director awards you the prizes. This particular aspect of the game could have been laid out in a little more detail in the manual.

I said above that there are no training or tutorial levels, and there aren't. But there are "skill trials" where you're supposed to maneuver in and out of cones, park the car in tight spaces etc. The problem with these levels is that the arrows indicating where to go are painted on the ground and are extremely difficult to see. I never managed to complete the first one of the 25 "skill" levels because I could never find the way out of the third parking box to wherever I was supposed to be going before I ran out of time.

What makes this lack of training and repetitive resetting problem worse is the loading times. Oh heck yes - the loading times. 12 seconds to restart a scene, plus the 3-2-1 countdown. 30 seconds to load a scene from scratch, 15 seconds to load just the cut scenes, and a whopping 45 seconds just to start the game. Oh my this is irritating.

The gameplay isn't too bad. It's your usual racing fare, only the cars seem very prone to flipping, have very bouncy suspension with no shock absorbers, and when driving, you will frequently get stuck on bits of scenery. There are three camera views, none of which are suitable for all the stunts in any one scene. The in-car cam suffers when you smash the windshield. The behind-car cam suffers when you're in a tight or dark space, then it becomes TombRaiderCam, getting stuck behind scenery. And the on-hood cam is the culprit that will have you sticking to every piece of scenery you go near.

The controls are fairly rudimentary, and here is where Infogrames show their penchant for being French-owned. Like everything French, they have to be different, and Stuntman is no exception. Most racing games on the PSX2 share similar control layouts. Stuntman is almost exactly opposite to all those games, except for the accelerator. Where you'll be used to having reverse, you now have brake. Where you're used to having brake, you now have handbrake. Where you're used to having handbrake, you now have reverse. Okay, every programming house is entitled to make their own decisions, but blatantly reversing the controls when compared to all other racing games just isn't necessary.

The "extra" controls aren't at all clear. I'm stuck on the first sequence of the second level because nowhere in the manual or the game does it tell you how to use the nitro. The nitro stunt is the last one on the level, so you can sweat and obfuscate your way through all the stunts (and all the repeats) until you get to the last jump then you're stuck. I tried mashing all the buttons (it worked for the cannon-roll at the end of level 1, for which, incidentally, there is also no manual or game explanation) but it didn't work. So I'm stuck now - I can't proceed because the manual is lousy and the in-game stuff doesn't explain how or what you're supposed to be doing.

Graphically, Stuntman is pretty good. It's mostly state-of-the-art stuff. The cars are eminantly smashable with all sorts of bits flying off. The scenery is good (but sticky - see above) and the atmosphere effects are nice. The sky is particularly well done, which is a good thing because you'll be spending a lot of time looking at it.

There is an extra gameplay mode, which is a freeplay stunt arena where you can place items you have won from the main game, such as ramps, barrels etc, then drive around jumping off them and smashing into things. The novelty of this wears off quickly though, and isn't enough to offset the badly-designed main part of the game.

Like I said - I really wanted to like this game. I'd been getting excited about the screengrabs and movies that were on the 'net before its release, but once again I find myself glad that I rented the game first rather than running out and buying it the day it came out. The game could have been ten thousand times more playable if you were allowed to dry-run the stunt sequences without the timer or the director, so you could get some idea of what it was you're supposed to be doing. I don't know if Infogrames didn't think of this, or ran out of time to put it in the game, but the lack of this mode makes Stuntman a seriously flawed title.