Stuntman: Ignition

 Stuntman series are an awesome idea - the idea of being in the middle of the action in the best movies ever made. The shame is the game fails hard when trying to deliver. First of all, the game physics engine is not that great - the driving, which is the key element if you want to feel the car, and by it be able to pull off the stunts, is very bad. The cars are not responsive enough, and during jumping stunts you can very easily be sent flying across the map or land on your roof because you hit a sign. It would not be such a big deal, if the stunt sequences were not so long, and if they did feature checkpoints. But they don't. It makes going for stringing a scene a real pain. There is also an other problem with stringing - if you want to string a scene, you will need to occasionally drop a director move - which is kind of stupid, with a logical thing being, that doing the route perfectly should let you achieve 5 stars. The game developers thought otherwise – stringing ends in being a constant drive close to the objects and drifting every corner which gets very repetitive and frustrating, since not getting one “close” will result in banking the score, which means losing any chance to get 5 stars. Also the objects you can drive close by are often scattered across the road which ends in missing the director moves to get one   - you can miss up to 4 director moves, the fifth will result in a re-shoot. In other words – the game play is crippled by being a “hit the right button at the right time” instead of “drive awesome and hit the stunts”. The other problem is that director moves add the same amount of time as regular moves – which makes them useless, and the only motivation for hitting them is to avoid a re-shoot. It’s a shame, because the idea of being a stuntman is great, but it was killed by sloppy design and bad transcription into a game.