Stuntman: Ignition Review

Stuntman for the original PS2 was a favorite of mine, despite its many flaws. The difficulty built in a lot of challenge and longevity into the experience and I kept playing in order to unlock the next movie trailer. The sequel, Stuntman Ignition, is still challenging, but a lot more forgiving (no load times on restarts! THANK YOU!) and adds a very addictive Tony Hawk-esque Combo Scoring System.

Graphics: 9/10
Pros: Fantastic visuals, great animation and action sequences. Gorgeous replays.
Cons: FMV for movie trailers (mixing with ingame graphics) aren't necessary anymore. They should have used the ingame engine to do the movie trailers to make it look less disjointed.

Gameplay: 8.5/10
Pros: The gameplay & scoring system is vastly improved. No load times for restarts, serious driving skills required, and a variety of movies, commercials, stunt shows, and cars to fool around with.
Cons: Levels still require a lot of trial and error to figure out what's going on. No real way to beat a level on your first try. Instead of confusing sketches during the load screens, they should give you a map with all the stunts on it that you can look through prior to your stunt run.

Sound/Music: 8/10
Pros: The voicework for the directors/characters is all really well done. There are definitely a few good impersonations and charicatures of directors currently out there. Sound effects do the job well.
Cons: Standard music and score detract from the epic orchestral scores we hear in the movies

Lasting Appeal: 6/10
Pros: There's online multiplayer with several different modes, stunt shows, commercials, and quite a few movies to shoot through. There's also the challenge of stringing (comboing) every single movie scene to get full stars on each stage and unlock everything for the build your own stunt arena...which offers quite a few thrills itself.
Cons: NO ONE plays online...guess this game didn't sell very well or everyone is just caught up with Halo 3, Gears of War, etc. It is really annoying being forced to replay levels again to get higher stars to unlock the next movie...if you beat all the levels...you should unlock the next level. I didnt' have the patience to go back and replay the levels again to unlock the final movie, since I had to play some others over to unlock the movie I had just completed.

Average: 78.75%
Tilt: -0.75%

Stuntman: Ignition lacks some of the charm the original had. I still remember the orginal as having some of the best graphics on PS2...Ignition doesn't leave the same impression as far as graphics go for PS3 or Xbox 360. The movies aren't as diversified either and there isn't the same sense of working your way up from a small indie film to the big budget blockbuster...they all sort of seem like blockbusters...which ups the action but reduces the charm. It's still a good sequel and a pretty engrossing experience though.

Verdict: 78%

this review is bases on the xbox 360 version