Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter

Ed Dawson likes hanging out in Space Taverns drinking unidentified blue stuff.

Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter is a straightforward first-person-shooter game along the lines of Red Faction, fused with arcadey spaceflight combat, as found in Star Wars: Starfighter or Starlancer.

Mace Griffin, a grizzled and dishonoured ex-Space Police dude is your avatar in this title from Warthog Games. Sent to jail for being the sole survivor of a covert alien attack, Mace has a big chip on his shoulder and an enormous motivation to maim and injure people. Lucky for him, on release he’s thrown straight into the violence-filled world of illegal space bounty hunting. With the voice of Henry Rollins, Mace is all set to kill millions of his random enemies and find a way to clear his name. This is where you come in.
 
In first person mode you get to run at the objectives and shoot everything. In this regard it is possibly one of the most derivative game worlds we have ever seen, heavily borrowing elements from Halo -- but without the same groundbreaking AI. You’ll endure many cargo holds filled with generic ‘Space Crates’, and carry out numerous jumping puzzles on the crates.

Then you’ll crawl through a ventilation duct and repeat. It’s not all bad news though, as the weapons are nicely created and bullets have an obvious ‘flight time’ that forces you to lead your targets at range. You can also hit enemies in the head for an instant kill. Our main problem is that unlike Red Faction, Mace Griffin doesn’t seem to have anything new to bring to this samey world of corridor and landscape combat. This lightweight rehash of tired game concepts will likely irk veteran first-person-gamers.

However, Mace’s story and setting have been quite well developed. An early mission sees you infiltrating and gunning down everyone within a flying temple filled with religious zealots.

These characters have submitted their will to their central computer, á la Star Trek’s Borg. A result of this submission is strange wiring attached to their heads and a low-res flat screen mounted over their faces, which displays a perpetual icon of a smiling face.

When you shoot them, obviously, it stops smiling. Comic touches like this help to alleviate the round-robin of samey action which you’ll be playing through. You follow a pretty linear path through missions offered by various Space-Barons and kill all different manner of Space Baddies for cash.

The really cool part about Mace Griffin is the spaceflight combat. This element of the game is really well presented. You’ll use heavy laser guns at long range and tricky bullet-strafing miniguns at short distances. You’ll follow enemy ships until they’re locked, and blow them up with missiles. Of course, most of this is standard fare for arcade style spaceflight games. So far so good. The amazing part in Mace Griffin is that during all of this space action, you can actually walk away from the cockpit and take a stroll around the ship, go downstairs, look out the windows, watch the action, enjoy yourself. The transition between these worlds is better than instant –- there is actually no transition to speak of.

We are excited about this, even though it doesn’t add anything functional to the gameplay.

It would have been cool if you could have been running back with a fire extinguisher and managing fires or damage created by a missile hit. Later in the game you get to pilot enormous cruise liners, although the controls don’t change much.

Although we’ve taken a quite few shots at Mace Griffin, there’s no particular element that we could single out and label as being obviously ‘bad’. It’s more that a greasy layer of mediocrity and ‘copy-cat’ features infuse a big percentage of the game. The cool spaceflight sections are much better and do a lot to compensate, although the game certainly isn’t in the ‘triple-A’ category. For a knockaround action experience, Mace Griffin is a bit of fun. But, purists should steer clear