Smuggler's Run Review

For PlayStation 2

By Contributing Writer Jimmy Payne

Rating: Average
   Imagine a game in which your objective is to transport stolen objects and 
secret messages to major terrorist groups in the US, all the while being 
hunted down by the American border patrol and more cops than you can shake 
a stick at.  Now imagine this game with horrible AI, boring missions, and 
one of the biggest difficulty jump ever seen, and you've just pictured 
Smuggler's Run.
   Smuggler's Run does have its strong points, one of which is the size of
the environments.  It's hard to believe that they're five square miles as it
says on the back of the box, but they're still huge any way you look at it.
This massive scale comes at a price, though.  Most of the space in these 
environments is taken up by bland mountains, trees, and the occasional 
house.  It doesn't matter how far you travel if there's nothing to see along
the way.
   The general approach towards different missions actually reminded me of 
a grossly under-rated Dreamcast game called Toy Commander.  The missions are
always offering something new, whether it's collecting pieces of a crashed 
plane and delivering them to a buyer or racing with other terrorist 
organizations to find out who is the best of the best.
   This all sounds fine and dandy, and on the surface, it is.  The reason 
Toy Commander's missions worked so well is because of the different modes of
completing them, ranging from planes to boats to race-cars.  Smuggler's Run 
only offers cars, and it doesn't take long for this to grow tiresome.  There
are multiple cars to choose from, but they aren't really all that different 
from one another if you look past the obligatory speed and endurance 
increases.
   The thing that really cripples Smuggler's Run is its horrible Artificial 
Intelligence.  Initially, the cop cars are only trained to catch up to you 
and then try to swerve in front of your path, causing you to run into them. 
Once you figure out how to avoid this, there's nothing they can do to stop 
you except for tapping the side of your car, which doesn't inflict much 
damage at all.
   At a certain point in the game, the difficulty level skyrockets without 
explanation.  There's no gradual increase in difficulty, you just go from 
mission to the next and all of a sudden, BAM!  The difficulty goes from 
insultingly easy to ridiculously hard.  The cop cars that were so helpless 
five minutes ago are now a huge pain in the ass, sucking out what little 
life the game has left.
   The true test of any game's AI is whether the computer-controlled 
opposition actually seems to get smarter as the game progresses, or whether 
they simply have their stats artificially boosted so that they have an 
unfair advantage.  The cop cars in Smuggler's Run never seem to be get 
smarter; they just miraculously manage to catch up to you no matter what.
I still found it possible to make it through the rest of the game, but I 
grew to dread every last minute of it rather than looking forward to playing
the game.
   I can see myself being drawn into the atmosphere of a game that focuses 
on smuggling.  Unfortunately, this just doesn't happen when I'm playing 
Smuggler's Run thanks to AI that seems to have been programmed by members of
the Extreme Bull Rider development team.

Send your thoughts on this review to jimmy@mastergamer.com

    
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