Gaming Target - GameCube: Minority Report: Everybody Runs

Written by Jonathan Nicklas on March 24, 2003

First Impressions: You can run, but you can't hide.

Minority Report. Another Tom Cruise vehicle that made a kajillion bucks. Of course, any action movie that makes some sort of buzz in the theaters is going to be graced with a video game. Unfortunately for a lot of those titles, they don't get the kind of treatment that they deserve. There are a whole lot of games like Driven, Top Gun, Mission Impossible and Scorpion King out there. The development house Treyarch does seem to be a bright light in this tunnel though. Their Spider-Man: The Movie game met with some pretty impressive sales figures and found a great balance between movie elements and extra content. So, with Treyarch at the helms, Minority Report: Everybody Runs has a decent shot at being worth playing.

The game is looking to follow the events of the movie pretty closely and will have you start out taking John Anderton on several missions with his Pre-Crime unit. Don't expect to be seeing Tom Cruise's likeness on John though, as the game has been forced to pursue other inspiration for its hero. Thankfully that is the only movie icon that isn't present in the game as Mag-lev Cars, Pre-Crime Hoverships and the stylish MR Lexus are all making appearances. However, just because you have seen the movie you shouldn't assume that you know how the game is going to end. To help keep this gaming experience fresh for players, Treyarch is including multiple different endings to the game. Hopefully this will be enough to warrant playing this game through a second time too.

As you make your way through Minority Report's 15 movie-inspired levels you will see many familiar sights including the Pre-Crime headquarters and Mall City. Don't go expecting every cinematic event to be coming home though, as some of the more recognizable sequences from the movie are being left out. This shows that Treyarch knows what they are doing and aren't trying to force something awkward to fit into the game. Fortunately, the jetpack is making its way home and should deliver a solid deviation from the hand-to-hand combat. Since Spider-Man: The Movie received such a great response from game playing crowds, Treyarch has built Minority Report off of the same game engine. That should mean that the hand-to-hand combat will work pretty well and that playability should be pretty high. A revamped camera system should help push Minority Report a level above the Spider-Man performance, especially as you beat your opponents down with one of twenty-plus combo moves. To help keep the action fresh, many of these combos will have to be bought on the black market, along with a helping of firearms, as the game progresses.

Many of these firearms that you will acquire will lend to the most appealing portion of the games graphics; the visual effects. Advance screenshots are showing us that while the game looks okay, the textures and models are nothing to write home about. The weapon and particle effects are a different story entirely as they are looking incredible. When you add in a pretty slick physics system that models character impacts well, you get a promising visual experience.