Starsky & Hutch

Jump into the classic “Gran Torino” and be the coolest cops in town.

EU release: 26th September 2003
NA release: 24th October 2003
JP release: N/A
Developer: Mind’s Eye, Supersonic
Publisher: Empire
NGC Magazine Score: N/A
Mods Used: Widescreen Hack

A budget title which I suspect was thrown onto shelves ahead of the reboot film which came out a few months later. However, this doesn’t license the film, rather the original 70s TV show. Strangely, every company involved (the original developers, the developers of the GameCube port and the original publishers) are British, which is rather odd for a classic American show. The game takes places across three seasons, with each mission being an “episode”.

The game is all about chasing and shooting cars. The handling is serviceable, but the shooting is what makes the game tedious. The aiming is done automatically. You can fire for a quick hit or wait longer to do slightly more damage. Either way, it takes hundreds of bullets to destroy a car, making each car chase last forever, unless you get lucky with traffic.

As you drive, there will be other things to shoot, like barrels and power-ups. Targeting these is solely reliant on luck, as you can’t adjust the auto aim in any way. These will give you some boosts, jam enemy weapons and gain you viewers. Viewers are both your score and your health. Instead of getting damaged when you get shot, you lose viewers and you lose if your score goes to zero. Hitting civilian cars and other objects will lose viewers, although shooting anything you can (including traffic lights and gas stations) are a good thing.

Despite this nifty mechanic, the shooting gameplay becomes tedious in mission 2, and that’s all every mission is. Some missions are also escort missions which are made even worse because the auto aim loves targeting the car you’re protecting, so the biggest challenge is not blowing them up yourself. There’s a free roam mode to collect badges and a race (which is mainly shooting the other cars), but nothing to mix things up.

The bizarre thing is, the ability to aim IS in the game. For this, you’ll need a second player. Player 1 drives while player 2 aims and shoots. I played it by mapping player 2’s analogue stick to the c-stick and you move a cursor around the screen – it doesn’t feel like it was made with an analogue stick in mind. On the PS2 and Xbox, this mode goes into full arcade mode with support for both a steering wheel and lightgun, which seems like a way to make the game rather fun – you could even try driving one-handed while aiming with the gun in your other hand. As the GameCube had no lightgun, it lacked this mode.

Poor

Starsky and Hutch is an average driving-shooting game at best. It’s got a little hook, the TV ratings concept, which works well and gives the game some lift. But after two or three missions, you’ll find the range of missions is incredibly small, the gameplay is overly simplistic, and the style of graphics and dialog to be more of an annoyance than a cult bonus.
Doug Perry, IGN

Remake or remaster?

It’s just a bad game.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to get Starsky & Hutch