Hunt or Be Hunted.2095, VOX message says there's trouble downtown. You pack your piece and head into the sultry night. The senator's dead body is still warm when you get to the scene. Professional hit. You eye the crowd in the unsentimental brightness of the city lights and feel a chill. The assassin is one link in a long chain. And more will die before the night is out.In this heart-pumping action-thriller, you're Neo-Hunter Rick Cage - a human bloodhound hired to track down the real killers of Senator McAllister. Use your sharp wit and even sharper shooting to navigate the dangerous metropolis of future San Francisco and its violent underworld of political corruption and cold-blooded greed.It's a race against time to track down the powers orchestrating the collapse of the new millennium.
- From the co-designer of X-Wing and TIE Fighter and the designer of the Super Star Wars game trilogy
- 50 twisting, turning, action-packed sub-missions rife with combat and puzzle-solving objectives
- Dramatic graphics stunningly rendered in cutting-edge "Anime"-style animation
- First person, side-scrolling action in 2 1/2-D combat environments teeming with drug lords, cyborgs and the vilest perpetrator of all
- Written by world-renowned author Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead) this intense plot-within-a-plot storyline comes alive with sizzling dialogue and continuous interaction between characters
- High-tech crime fighting, including DNA analyzation
- Cinematic soundtrack with original music and action-enhancing sound effects
~ from the back of the box
It's very rare for a cancelled game to see the light of day. If they do, it comes in one of two ways; the leaking of the beta code or the resurrection and release from another company. In the mid-90's, LucasArts cancelled a game from Edward Kilham, the mind behind X-Wing and TIE Fighter. Back then they called it Calia 2095 but when Kilham left the company to form Ronin Entertainment, he took the bones of the game with him. And this is when it was re-christened to Neo Hunter.
While the split appears rather amicable - Ronin would work on Star Wars: Force Commander for them in 2000 - there is still a fair amount of LucasArts DNA in this cyberpunk gallery shooter. The art director had a hand in Super Star Wars, Ghoul Patrol and - most notably - Full Throttle, and the cartoon animation style returns here. We open with a whole 10 minutes of story-filled cutscenes, complete with some nice voice acting and great animation created in-engine as opposed to video files. A senator has been killed, and you've been tasked with finding the killer. You must travel around the cityscapes of a futuristic California in search of as much information as you can to close in on the perpetrator. But a seedy conspiracy also awaits.
The story, by Ender's Game author Orson Scott Card, is perhaps a little too in depth for such a simple gun game. The plot twists and turns as you go down routes that lead to nothing other than some dead criminal bosses and a mass grave of henchmen. It's written in the plot that you use stun bullets which lessens the violence some what, but also the stakes. You enter each stage by clicking on the red markers on the city map, and the only goal is to survive until you can beat the hell out of the area's mob boss. Occasionally, the action will pause for some plot, but it's mostly about shooting.
You can carry two weapons, one in your left hand and one in your right. The corresponding mouse button controls each. To begin with, both are the same but you can purchase shotguns and machine guns from a weapon shop on the map. Your ammo is unlimited, though it is conditional. On the left hand side, a blue bar indicates how many bullets you have left, but hold off from shooting for a bit and it will slowly regenerate. The same can be said for you shield. Most levels have pauses while enemies get into position which indicates you can exhale and recharge for a brief moment. This gives you some unusual choices during frantic moment; do you keep shooting in barely effective staccato, or do you take some damage so you can build up your reserves. Different weapons have different recharge speeds, but these stats can also upgraded from the weapon shop.
While not 3D like the more impressive contemporaries at the time, the camera will zoom in and out in spectacular fashion. The nicely drawn backgrounds do look blurry and almost incomprehensible when you do, making the clear enemy sprites look out of place, but it gives each mission a frantic thrill. With around 30 of them, they do get repetitive fairly quickly, and all of the added equipment such as grenades and new weapons do nothing to significantly help. If you do get tired, you can mooch about in your apartment and play some mini-games.
Made to look like computer programs made for hacking and crime solving, they are welcome diversions. The Spectrum Analyzer used to bypass the protection of security chips has you place different devices to guide a beam of light to the receptor. It will need to be the right colour and the right width to unlock, but this logic puzzle isn't as easy as it sounds. Each component varies with its output type and angle so the solution is more trial and error than anything. Then there's the Netrunner, an internet spying tool that has you implant viruses on different computer terminals represented as circular nodes. Essentially, it's a maze that has you find the right node to take you to the next level.
There are three more mini-games in the apartment and two of them involve DNA. DNA Splicer has you filling in missing DNA of a genome by dragging and dropping the broken bits into the helix. No more complex than a jigsaw puzzle, the placement of the segments are made through trial and error. DNA Decoder is your classic game of Mastermind. Place strands of DNA in a box and see what percentage is correct. Move them around to see if that number goes up or down and when it reaches 100, it will fill in the gap of the DNA and find out who it belongs to. The final game is a shooting gallery where you can hone your skills and try out new weapons in a number of difficulty settings. You can spend a lot of time in the apartment doing all of these tasks, but you can change up the music in the CD player to keep things fresh.
Beyond this, you have a PDA which will detail story beats in a diary, ongoing contracts and character bios if you're interested. While the story is a good one, with well-written dialogue that uses made-up future-slang that's fully detailed in the manual, it does sit a little uneasily with the main bulk of the game. Action-heads will tire of the lengthy cutscenes in favour of Virtua Cop or Time Crisis. Adventure nerds will baulk at the constant combat go play Full Throttle or Blade Runner instead. And puzzle fanatics will hate both and go back to Tetris. An alright game with plenty of talent behind it, but there's better alternatives out there for every type of gamer.
To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses the DOSBox-X build of DOSBox to bring the game to modern systems. Manual included. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 10.
Download
NeoHunter is © Virgin Interactive Entertainment Inc
Review, Cover Design and Installer created by me
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Infect computer systems with spyware in the Netrunner (left).
Bypassing security chips using the Spectrum Analyzer (right).
The story, by Ender's Game author Orson Scott Card, is perhaps a little too in depth for such a simple gun game. The plot twists and turns as you go down routes that lead to nothing other than some dead criminal bosses and a mass grave of henchmen. It's written in the plot that you use stun bullets which lessens the violence some what, but also the stakes. You enter each stage by clicking on the red markers on the city map, and the only goal is to survive until you can beat the hell out of the area's mob boss. Occasionally, the action will pause for some plot, but it's mostly about shooting.
You can carry two weapons, one in your left hand and one in your right. The corresponding mouse button controls each. To begin with, both are the same but you can purchase shotguns and machine guns from a weapon shop on the map. Your ammo is unlimited, though it is conditional. On the left hand side, a blue bar indicates how many bullets you have left, but hold off from shooting for a bit and it will slowly regenerate. The same can be said for you shield. Most levels have pauses while enemies get into position which indicates you can exhale and recharge for a brief moment. This gives you some unusual choices during frantic moment; do you keep shooting in barely effective staccato, or do you take some damage so you can build up your reserves. Different weapons have different recharge speeds, but these stats can also upgraded from the weapon shop.
 |
 |
Completing DNA with both the DNA Decoder (left) and DNA Splicer (right).
While not 3D like the more impressive contemporaries at the time, the camera will zoom in and out in spectacular fashion. The nicely drawn backgrounds do look blurry and almost incomprehensible when you do, making the clear enemy sprites look out of place, but it gives each mission a frantic thrill. With around 30 of them, they do get repetitive fairly quickly, and all of the added equipment such as grenades and new weapons do nothing to significantly help. If you do get tired, you can mooch about in your apartment and play some mini-games.
Made to look like computer programs made for hacking and crime solving, they are welcome diversions. The Spectrum Analyzer used to bypass the protection of security chips has you place different devices to guide a beam of light to the receptor. It will need to be the right colour and the right width to unlock, but this logic puzzle isn't as easy as it sounds. Each component varies with its output type and angle so the solution is more trial and error than anything. Then there's the Netrunner, an internet spying tool that has you implant viruses on different computer terminals represented as circular nodes. Essentially, it's a maze that has you find the right node to take you to the next level.
 |
 |
Test your gunplay skills in the Shooting Gallery (left).
Buying upgrades in one of the city's weapon shops (right).
There are three more mini-games in the apartment and two of them involve DNA. DNA Splicer has you filling in missing DNA of a genome by dragging and dropping the broken bits into the helix. No more complex than a jigsaw puzzle, the placement of the segments are made through trial and error. DNA Decoder is your classic game of Mastermind. Place strands of DNA in a box and see what percentage is correct. Move them around to see if that number goes up or down and when it reaches 100, it will fill in the gap of the DNA and find out who it belongs to. The final game is a shooting gallery where you can hone your skills and try out new weapons in a number of difficulty settings. You can spend a lot of time in the apartment doing all of these tasks, but you can change up the music in the CD player to keep things fresh.
Beyond this, you have a PDA which will detail story beats in a diary, ongoing contracts and character bios if you're interested. While the story is a good one, with well-written dialogue that uses made-up future-slang that's fully detailed in the manual, it does sit a little uneasily with the main bulk of the game. Action-heads will tire of the lengthy cutscenes in favour of Virtua Cop or Time Crisis. Adventure nerds will baulk at the constant combat go play Full Throttle or Blade Runner instead. And puzzle fanatics will hate both and go back to Tetris. An alright game with plenty of talent behind it, but there's better alternatives out there for every type of gamer.
To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses the DOSBox-X build of DOSBox to bring the game to modern systems. Manual included. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 10.
File Size: 213 Mb. Install Size: 482 Mb. Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ
Download
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NeoHunter is © Virgin Interactive Entertainment Inc
Review, Cover Design and Installer created by me
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Visually it looks interesting, I've always had a fondness for that MS-Paint-like animation style used in Eternam and The Wand of Gamelon. The cover made me think this was Wetlands at first, but no it's a title I don't think I encountered during my youth.
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