Minority Report Review

You might think that Treyarch's competent game adaptation of the Spider-Man movie would bode well for the developer's latest movie tie-in, Minority Report: Everybody Runs. You'd be wrong, though. This title is more in line with the licensed-property cliché of uninspired gameplay that is completely tangential to the movie. It's exactly in line, actually, and embarrassingly so. Though, to the developer's credit, all three versions of the game are more or less equal. The Xbox version has a smoother frame rate than the other versions. The PS2 version can get choppy, and the resolutions of the textures are lowered. Otherwise, the game plays the same on all three platforms.

The plot of the Minority Report game is loosely coupled to that of the movie and the Philip K. Dick short story upon which the movie was based.

The plot of the Minority Report game is loosely coupled to that of the movie and the Philip K. Dick short story upon which the movie was based. The setting is Washington DC in the year 2054. You assume the role of the Precrime Division's captain, John Anderton, stopping murders before they happen thanks to the information provided by three precognitive mutants. When the precogs foresee you committing murder, you become the target of your own organization. The similarities to the source material diminish from there. A few choice scenes somewhat ape ones from the movie, but the resolution of the plot is entirely different, and due to likeness rights issues, the bulk of the characters bear no resemblance to their movie counterparts. It would have been better to just make a new story with the same setting than to half redo the movie with unrecognizable characters.

The goal in each of the 40-plus levels in Minority Report: Everybody Runs is merely to get to the end, but along the way there are plenty of Precrime officers, mall security guards (available in two varieties: fat and skinny), guard bots, spider bots, and rioters and riot cops. Most of the time you'll want to just evade them and move forward through the level, but quite often the game will force you to fight, because in the future, certain doors open only if you knock out enough policemen or disable enough robots in front of them. Rumor has it these special doors were invented by game designers a long time ago, and they are valued by the architects of the year 2054 because of their durability and status as antique curiosities. The game does at least tell you when you've come to an area with such a door so you won't waste time trying to find a way to progress, but the artificiality of it all just doesn't jibe with the way the movie flowed. There are only a couple of times when you could actually get the feeling that you're on the run like in the movie, but even in those areas the game never actually requires it. Ultimately, this game might as well have been titled "Minority Report: Everybody Pummels Hundreds of Cops." There's no "scrubbing" element (the analysis of the precogs' visions) present in the game either, which is a big disappointment if you liked those parts of the movie.

Ultimately, this game might as well have been titled "Minority Report: Everybody Pummels Hundreds of Cops."

The shoehorning of the combat-oriented gameplay into the Minority Report license might have been forgivable if the developer hadn't made a number of odd gameplay decisions as well. Chalk it up to Treyarch not being mindful of what worked and what didn't in the side-scroller beat-'em-ups that came before. The main gameplay element that should have been arrested for the future ruining of this game is the continue scheme. While other games of this type allow you to continue in same place you died, just resuming the fight with full health, Minority Report forces you to restart the level. Some levels are quite long, and some have a few fairly difficult brawls, making the proposition of starting them over a few times more than a little unpalatable. The other big lesson that went unlearned is variety of characters. There are about 10 stock characters and five bosses, not even close to enough for 40-plus levels of game. The two types of Precrime officers get different skin colors, armbands, and weapons, but otherwise none of the characters vary in the slightest. Rarely, some characters exhibit a little bit of personality by taunting you, but the sound used in the brawls is mostly limited to the sound effects of hitting and three or four different grunts of pain when someone gets knocked down. A little bit of variety comes from being able to throw opponents to their death from great heights. If you can get past the cognitive dissonance that comes from throwing someone--someone with whom your character used to work, no less--off a rooftop while attempting to prove that you're not a murderer, then you'll be treated to some great screams that unfortunately fall off way too quickly due to a poorly implemented sound engine. Anderton's hearing radius appears to be about 20 feet.