Minority Report: Everybody Runs - Can't Outrun Bullets

12/12/23

I’d say beat’em ups are a sleeper genre for me - I don’t play a whole lot of them, but there've been a couple of them, like the old Punisher and The King of Fighter arcade games, or the more recent and widely acclaimed Streets of Rage 4. I’m never quite looking for good beat’em ups, but I’m never sad to stumble upon them. As someone who knows next to nothing about Minority Report, all I was hoping for was some satisfying beat’em up action with the slight twists on the genre I’d read from a review here and there. Well, to be frank, I didn’t get that - Minority Report: Everybody Runs is a flawed, ugly game, interspaced with occasional moments of decent action that keeps it a step above being nigh unplayable - but only just.

We’re gonna jump right into the review, as I’ve tried to write my patented ‘here’s what the game means to my past’ as I’m wont to do, but I’ve tried to write a paragraph about Minority Report about six times and I’ve got nothing that doesn’t just fall flat. If I were to say anything about Minority Report’s general design philosophy it’d be… interesting. In many ways, this is a beat ‘em up in the same vein as Streets of Rage or Double Dragon, just with a greater focus on gunplay over punching the tar out of your foes. Sure, you can slap them around, but you won’t be getting far if you try and play it like one of the old classics. No, the bread and butter of Minority Report is the fact that this is a cover-based, 2D shoot’em up, with a heavy focus on playing slowly, locking on to your foes, and hiding out when gunfire grows too intense. It’s certainly a slower paced title in the overall genre, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In theory. In theory, communism works!

The general combat loop is simple; when close to enemies, you can just tap the action button to slap the fools with the butt of your weapon, usually knocking them down to give you some breathing room. Leaping into the air and hitting the button will throw one of your limited stock of grenades, which will hit everything hard and probably knock them down in the process. Simple, but relatively satisfying stuff, and the closest we get to the genre it’s remixing. But trust me, you won’t be getting anywhere near your armed foes without bringing your own weapons to bear. Tapping the shoulder buttons will lock onto an enemy - not the closest one, but one seemingly randomly - and hitting the action button will open fire on them. Your prey don’t have any difference between them; some will try and slap you with fists or melee weapons, whilst others will pepper you with bullets from affair - only bosses have any kind of unique movesets to set them about. Also, as you move through each area, innocent civilians will be filtered amongst them - but hitting them with your weapons will deduct an entire life - a fact I find bullshit, for the record - from your stock, forcing you to pick your targets carefully.

I don’t, conceptually, hate the moment-to-moment gameplay of Minority Report - I’m a big fan of games like Streets of Rage, so a beat’em up that tries some new ideas is great by me. When it works, it’s… fine. Carving through melee goons is as easy as slicing through butter, and you can get a bit of a good rhythm as you stand your ground, shooting down a squad of foes in a moment. Plus, it’s pretty satisfying to leap into the air, tossing a grenade and watching a whole host of goons go flying, and even if it doesn’t kill them there and then, quickly shooting through the near-death goons is great. The boss fights are the only thing I’d call actively decent in the game - for example, the first boss fight will split himself into a number of holograms, forcing you to use the targeting system efficiently to take him out. Other than that, sad to say, once you’ve played the first level or two, you really won’t be seeing anything new - except greater and great helpings of pain.

But this is all when the game works, and the moments that occur are far and few between. My biggest issue with the game is just how *awkward* it feels. Thus the aforementioned pain. Our hero feels like he’s moving through a sea of dead worms, and even in the moments you’re beset on all sides, you have to keep your feet firmly planted on the ground when firing. I’ve seen criticism leveled at the targeting system, but I found that perfectly bearable as compared to how awkward moving our hero around is, if a little janky from time to time. But to make matters worse, even turning around feels awkward, as you have to unlock your weapon, and then spend a split second physically turning, the camera sliding along in concert. On its own this wouldn’t be an issue, but with how brutal gunfire can be in this game, even that half-second can spell doom for our utterly outmatched hero. The fact enemy gunfire is so potent is rage-inducing on its own; multiple times I was moving through an area, and due to the game’s sluggish controls was left open for mere moments. Two enemies - two goddamn enemies - ruined my evening there and then, taking my last life as they fired in a manner *just* spaced out enough to leave me utterly locked in damage frames, sealing my fate. I get it - it’s gunfire, it’s supposed to bloody hurt, but I’m not looking for that kind of realism in a game about people predicting crimes in the future - I’m looking for a good time, and I ain’t finding it in goddamn Minority Report: Everyone Runs.

On that note, I hope you don’t mind if I rant for a little bit about the straw that broke the camel’s back, that just led me to dropping the game there and then. Now, this cover-based shoot’em up is, in many ways, a pretty novel concept. It hearkens back to the classics with its general beat’em up attitude and look, but does something unique that makes it stick out. The big issue is that I just felt like the cover system barely worked *at the best of times*. You have to double-tap A to roll into cover, and in my experience this worked… maybe half the time? Every other time I’d just find myself pressed, standing, against the cover, still completely open to enemy gunfire. And as early as the third level, being in the path of gunfire is a death sentence almost instantly. Enemy gunfire seems to inflict a miniscule stun upon our hero, but if you’re facing up against multiple foes with weaponry, they’ll deplete your health bar in seconds if you don’t get the jump on them, and combining that fact with the already awkward controls and shoddy cover mechanics, that isn’t always an easy thing. Oh yeah, did I mention that sometimes, for seemingly no reason, cover just decides to *not work*?. I’ll be crouched behind cover, not firing, not doing anything… and I just have one of those, ‘well, guess I’ll die’ moments as gunfire slaughters me regardless of my position. In all honesty, this was the thing that broke the game for me. Frustration that even when I was genuinely playing the game correctly, it still just decided to tell me to sod off just isn’t fun to deal with in any way. It harkens back to old, coin-consuming arcade machines, and it sucks. It just sucks.

The levels themselves aren’t particularly interesting, having a very minor maze-like element as you shoot and kill through the eight or so stages. With several levels just being relative repeats of previous ones, you don’t get a whole ton of varied, engaging level designs to work with, either. Alternate paths will lead to extra health or lives, or more rarely new weapons that’ll help you tip the scales in your favor. Honestly, the first two or three weapons you get really do the job satisfactorily enough, so I never felt the need to seek them out past the second stage, as enemies really aren’t complicated enough to require anything better than the old faithful favorites. There’s also very little indication you’re getting anywhere as you’re moving through these areas, as the environments rarely change, and considering some enemies respawn when you renter rooms, it can play havoc with trying to discern if you’d come from a certain direction or not - and this before you get into the hot mess of certain rooms doubling back on the way you’ve come from.

I also want to shout out a very small, yet very potent issue I discovered with the game. When you wrap up a level, you’ll get, thankfully, the option to save, with the options YES or NO - the issue is, both the currently selected option and the unselected option are both lit in highly fluorescent blue and red, respectively. I died in level 3, and was about to rage quit there and then when I thought my game save had been deleted after running out of lives, or the worry the *ahem* less-than-legal way I was playing the game didn’t support saving. No, no; it’s just a terrible UX decision that led to me having no idea if I was actually saving the game or not. Look, I get it, I’m not the smartest cookie, but the fact I got tripped up on that *multiple times* before working it out has to say something, right?

I’ve never seen Minority Report, but I *have* read its Wikipedia page, and from what I gather, the game is a perfectly serviceable, albeit brief, adaptation of the film. No idea if our protagonist (I literally can’t remember his name and I ain’t looking it up again) gunned down dozens of dudes breaking out of his police station, but I’m willing to say that it’d be a worse movie without it. What this game certainly *doesn’t* do is translate the on-screen action of Minority Report onto a video game format, because this game looks *bad*. Not, ‘I can’t tell what’s going on’ bad, but still pretty bad. Character sprites are blurry and hard to see any real detail, and as I said, the levels aren’t interesting enough to write home about. Plus, the sound design didn’t exactly blow my socks off, either. Forgettable, really, considering I had to google the soundtrack to actually remember what any of it sounded like, and even as I write this the memory of it escapes me. So, uh, yeah. Not great.

Minority Report: Everybody Runs isn’t the worst tie-in game I’ve ever seen, but it does little to make me ever want to think about it again. It presents some interesting, relatively unique ideas when it comes to a beat’em up/shoot’em up title, but its execution fails on a variety of levels. Frustrating at the best of times, the game’s brutal difficulty, spotty design and outright refusal to follow its own rules from time to time is a variety of nails in the proverbial coffin. I’ve played worse on the Game Boy Abyss, but few have made me rage quit the way Minority Report does. Stay away folks - it’s not so bad it’s good, but it’s bad enough to never approach the realm of good.

Thank you so much for reading my review of Minority Report - Everybody Runs! Look, I might’ve not clicked with this one that much, but at least my playtime was on the shorter side. I’ll be on break next week as I get my review ready for a slightly more memorable - if not exactly *great* - title. Either way, you can email me at either mgeorge7003@hotmail.com or cckaiju@gmail.com if you have any requests or questions, or over at Twitter @Lemmy7003. Thanks again for reading, and I’ll see you in my next review, where I'll be takig a look at something a bit more... dicey, in nature.