Minority Report Review

You would have thought that an action/adventure title from the creators of the excellent Spiderman games and based upon the hit movie Minority Report would be something to get excited about; but unfortunately this game is nowhere near to being the futuristic thriller that it says on the tin.<br><br>Minority Report has been created using the same engine as SpiderMan: The Movie, and this is painfully evident as the end result comes across as just another mindless generic action/adventure clone.<br><br>The game follows closely to the events and background offered by the movie, however (because of licensing fees) players control PreCrime Officer John Anderton instead of a digital recreation of Tom Cruise. For anyone who hasn’t seen the film, the story takes place in 2054, a time when crime has all but been eliminated thanks to the PreCrime organisation. This organisation employs three physic women who have the ability to predict violent acts before they occur, giving PreCrime officers the chance to get to the scene before the act has been committed.<br>Unfortunately the character you control gets framed for a murder; ending up on the run from his own patrol and desperately trying to prove his own innocence.<br><br>The game pits players through 40 levels of mindless beat-em-up action; bizarrely most of these can be completed in no time at all thanks to being able to just run straight through the level. Later levels try to adjust the balance by putting more emphasis on fights, but it’s unlikely that the sloppy and unremarkable combat system will do anything to spark your interest; we preferred to just keep on running, and for a game that features a main character trying to prove his innocence of murdering someone, there sure is a lot of killing going on!!!<br><br>To be fair you can execute a fair amount of moves, including the likes of punches, kicks, throws and combo’s using variations on the three-button attacks. However one major flaw became embarrassingly evident right from the start; it’s possible to execute a sliding manoeuvre that stuns your opponents, simply repeat this time and again, and you’ll be able to complete most of the game with just this one command!<br><br>The range of weapons from the film are featured, giving you the chance to use wave-guns, rocket launchers and machine pistols. To be fair these offer a little variation to the basic punch-kick technique, but unfortunately the execution is a little weak as switching between targets can cause a lot of problems.<br>Unless you’ve got the patience off a saint it’s extremely unlikely that you’re going to sit through 40 levels of the monotonous action; the AI of the enemy characters brightens things up somewhat as they do put up quite an intelligent fight, but it’s just not enough to save this game.<br>In an effort to try and add some depth to the proceedings, the game features a Black Market similar to that featured in the film. Here you can buy a variety of new combo’s, weapons and health bonuses from the money you find on each level, but once again it’s been poorly implemented and heightens the generic feel of this game. <br><br>The visuals are very hit-and-miss, we’ve certainly seen and come to expect a lot better on the Xbox; generally the lighting and special effects from the weapons look great and feel like they’ve been lifted straight from the movie. However all this does is show up the mediocrity of the rest of the visuals, environments are bland affairs that have very little variation or detail (that Sci-Fi grey). The worst effect however are the so-called rag-doll physics, we’ve seen this to great effect in games like Hitman2, but here it simply looks like you’re fighting with puppets on strings, as their limbs twitch and jump out of place.<br>