It’s not that Mace Griffin is a bad game. It’s just that it’s not a particularily good one either. If you make a game like this without any sort of multi-player, then everything else about the game had better be absolutely flawless, to the point of making gamers everywhere soak their highwater pants in glee. However, everything about Mace is just pretty mediocre. Even the voice of Henry Rollins couldn’t save Vivendi’s souls.

You play as Mace Griffin, a bounty hunter. I know, you probably could have guessed that, but he’s not just a plain old run-of-the-mill bounty hunter, he’s an intergalactic one, and a former member of the Rangers, a sort of outer space police force, who’s out to find out who framed him.

Gameplay is mostly just Mace running around and shooting stuff, like you’d expect. There are pistols, grenade launchers, machine guns, and nothing really new or interesting. When you aren’t running around shooting stuff, you get to fly around in space and shoot things out there, which is both new and interesting, but not very well executed. The first couple of ship battles are a bit refreshing, but sluggish controls and little variety (chase, then shoot....chase, then shoot) leave them feeling old before they should. Despite the disappointing space combat, the ground combat just isn’t terrible, cliched weapons be damned. The AI is pretty good, and the controls are surprisingly decent.

Mace isn’t going to wow you in the visuals department either. All of the enviornments look simple and uninspired, and the character and enemy design is just really unimpressive. Same with the sounds and music. The game looks and sounds like something you might make if Agetec ever came out with a game called "FPS Maker!" It would be cool to show your friends, but it’s not going to get your foot in the door of the video game industry or anything.

If you’re absolutely insane over games that combine first person action with a lot of gunning and grenading, then you would probably do well to go out and buy Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter. It’s at a low price point (19.99 at the time of this writing) and is probably well worth it to you. For the rest of us, we can probably skip out on this game and still live with ourselves. It’s not a bad game, as I said, but for a game that was so often delayed, one has to wonder why they didn’t take any of that time to make Mace something special.

· · · AFX