Publisher: Infogrames: www.infogrames.com
Ages: seven and up.
Parental
Advisory:
Kids are encouraged
to drive recklessly.
Game players love car crashes, so why not create a driving game that provides challenging courses and encourages destruction and crashes? Infogrames' Stuntman lets you become a stunt-car driver who performs in a series of Hollywood-style action-packed films. It's a fresh, innovative twist on car driving games that is challenging and fun to play.
As a stunt car driver, you travel to various movie sets around the world, and film scenes for a variety of action flicks. After completing a series of stunts for a movie, you get to watch full-motion video trailers that include your stunts spliced in. You also get to unlock bonus items that include jumps, burning hoops and stacked vehicles. In all , the game offers some 40 vehicles that have different handling and performance characteristics, and a varied selection of stunts to perform.
The game offers different play modes that include a career mode, driving tests, and a stunt constructor mode. The career mode is the game's main play mode that lets you take on the career of a Hollywood driver. Here you perform stunts for different movies that are set in London, Monaco, Bangkok, and more, and the films feature themes that resemble those in real movies, for example, James Bond films. The driving test mode offers several trials that gauge your driving skills. And the stunt constructor mode lets you place ramps, barrels, and other objects in an arena to make and perform your own stunts.
On each stunt course, the game offers rather vague directions. Onscreen visual aids come in the form of green arrows and yellow symbols to guide you from one stunt to the next along a set path. As you drive, the director shouts directions to hit certain objects and make turns.
As you drive, you'll find that a single wrong turn or crash will quickly ruin a scene. A mistake causes the director to yell "cut," and then you have to start the course again from the beginning. The game makes you learn each course by trial and error, until you memorize the course and get it right by driving a perfect run. Yes, the game can be frustrating, which will turn off some players. At least all of the setups, which include moving vehicles, pedestrians, and other elements are consistent on every run.
The graphics are first rate. The vehicle models and the environments are particularly detailed and well done, and I was impressed with the vehicle and crash physics, and animation. Also, the sounds for the many collisions, explosions and such were quite good.
The only real downside is that the game's loading sequences are long, and this is most apparent when you are restarting a level, which will happen often. As a result, it's easy to become impatient with the game.
In all, Stuntman is a fresh, innovative game that offers a new driving experience. It will frustrate some who won't like the game's trial and error nature, but most should find the experience quite entertaining.
playstation - Stuntman
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