Hundreds of years in the future, several dominant races occupy a host of solar systems and discover new planets on a regular basis. These races are mainly the Jaldari, Velleakan, and of course, the Humans. Huge conglomeates vie for rich resources on every new world, resulting in fighting, smuggling and the emergence of pirate clans. To combat this growing trend towards war, the government sets up a group of highly elite Rangers, who are quickly brought now by an unknown traitor. Mace Griffin, the only surviving ranger, becomes a bounty hunter and sets out to discover the truth behind his team's ruin.
Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter puts the player in a first-person combat mode and also features space flight action. The game features a total of ten different usable weapons that range from a futuristic looking pistol to a futuristic machine gun and sniper rifle. Similar to games like Unreal Tournament on the PC, all weapons have secondary fire. The machine gun, for example, can throw grenade like bombs. Both the secondary and primary fire in the machine gun have a separate amount of ammo. The pistol on the other hand, which shoots faster like a machine gun on secondary fire, uses the same ammo for both primary and secondary fire.
Locations in the game range from space colonies to large sized space ships. Unlike Halo: Combat Evolved, the levels/areas are pretty small. They aren't small as in the area you can explore, but similar to games like Red Faction on the PlayStation 2, the entire level of the game doesn't load when the game starts. Because of this, the game pauses after every once in a while and loads the rest of the level. This gets very frustrating at times.
Another thing about the game is its difficulty which is pretty high, to say the least. To be honest, I suffered so much in the game just on the normal difficulty that it reminded me once of when I saw my girl friend trying to beat a level of Halo on the 'Legendary' difficulty. Enemies are either highly dangerous, or you'll find them sitting in a corner without a weapon basically trying to tell you they give up. On the other hand, the A.I. can act almost as if they're retarded. On a couple occasions, the enemies didn't look at me, let alone try to kill me even though I was standing right in front of them.
I felt like smashing the controller a couple times because I would pass a very hard part where there were enemies everywhere including ones with machine guns and campers with sniper rifles with bullets flying right over your head missing you by an inch. Anyways, then I'd die 20 minutes later to find out I'd respawn and have to go through the whole area again from the start. The game uses "checkpoints".
I truly enjoyed the way the game has seamless transitions from first-person bloodbaths to space flights. How this works is that after a certain objective, you'll be told to find your space ship and board it and continue on so you'd get a different objective. You simply walk up to the ship, and then the door. You head to the control room, and then press the Y button which makes your character sit on the pilot's seat and take control. From here, the game will pause and load the space level. It starts out on auto-pilot. The craft lifts up, docks out, and you'll find yourself in an immense battle with other aliens. From here on, you're in control. Shooting down enemies can be very difficult at times because they move very fast. The game features six different ships for you to pilot, and all ships have two weapons. You can shoot missiles, and then you have your primary guns. Another cool aspect of the game is that you can just get off your seat at any time when you're in space and look out another window to view asteroids, enemy ships and even planets.
When I first saw Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter, I was truly amazed with the game's visuals. The game runs very smoothly at a solid 60 frames per second. Enemies & environments look great, and weapons' models are just top notch. All the characters have very realistic facial animations. At one point in the game, I fell what seemed over a 100 feet into the water. The water is has also been very realisticaly implemented into the game. I encountered fish trying to bite my butt as I swam to the surface for air.
The sound in the game is also good. Weapons' effects have been implemented nicely, and the music changes depending on your environments. The music gets faster and louder when enemies start attacking and lowers down when you've blown them all up to oblivion. So in other words, the music plays in conjunction to the mood of the environment.
Overall, you should definitely check out Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter. The gameplay is hard, but fun. It's another one of those games you can show off to one of your friends to show the Xbox's visual capabilities. If you're an FPS fan, you will want to at least rent the game. It can be frustrating at times because of the difficulty, but when it's all said and done, Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter is a kick-ass shooter.
