Minority Report: Everybody Runs

The PlayStation adaption of the Sci-Fi thriller aims to achieve the same dystopian anxiety as the film.

Making video games based on successful movies must have been so difficult during the Playstation 2 era because each licensed game seems to be an utter failure. Minority Report is no exception to this rule.

I do understand making a video game based on a movie is a delicate balance, between satisfying fans of the film and making a quality product that someone who hasn’t seen the movie might still enjoy.

But Minority Report fails on both fronts. The game isn’t enjoyable at all. Not even close and despite having an incredible sci-fi story handed to them on a silver platter, the few and far between cut scenes do the plot line absolutely no justice whatsoever. Thirty second clips, that hop around and barely explain themselves or the context of the story to that point.

For those of you who may not have seen the Spielberg Sci-Fi thriller, Minority Report, the plot focuses around, John Anderton, the Chief of the department of Precrime in Washington D.C. in the future (sometime in the 2050’s). Precrime is essentially powered by these weird empaths that can see into the future, displaying future crimes before they are committed. Precrime arrives before the crime happens apprehending the would be assailant. All is fine and dandy until one day the Precrime monitor shows our protagonist murder a man in cold blood. A friend of his on the force believing Anderton is a good man and not capable of such a thing gives him ample time to escape where he becomes a fugitive, desperately seeking answers.

It’s a novel idea and a cool concept to base a video game around but that just simply isn’t how it worked out.

The first most obvious flaw is the difficulty. I tried playing the game on Easy which is much closer to some sort living-hell-impossible-nightmare-difficulty. There is forty levels in the game and I managed to reach level six before dying so often that I wanted to murder myself for buying this game. It is your typical button mash and pray beat ‘em up but the enemies you face are at times nearly indestructible, have weapons (when normally you don’t) and come in infinite waves.

One of the only fun things to do in the game is to throw enemies over railings to their deaths. But even after about 12,000 of those that gets stale.

Also another thing that sucks about this game is the logic. Apparently, the only way to absolve yourself from any suspicion that you are capable of murdering someone is to literally kill tens of thousands of police officers trying to apprehend you.

The A.I. is predictable yet unstoppable. The only way you stand a chance of surviving is to learn ridiculously stupid combination moves that may or may not work at any given moment.

The voice acting, what little there is of it, is fine even though the developers obviously didn’t want to or couldn’t afford Tom Cruise’s likeness (who plays Anderton in the film). I like to think that Tom Cruise wanted to be apart of the game and he excitedly tried it out but after only mere seconds realized how awful this thing really is. The awful and repetitive level design throwing him into a torrent of rage, forcing him to grab his PlayStation from the television stand and toss is through the window of his billion dollar mansion.

Miserable and disappointing, playing this game felt like I was doing a prison sentence in the world’s most annoying prison. Stick with the original film.

Overall: 64%

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