Stuntman: Hollywood [Preview] Checking the dailies on a franchise revival

Hands-on with the next great vroomer

If there is a video game equivalent of having your cake and eating it too, it might be getting the return of a beloved stunt based driving franchise after 19 years and partnering with Universal to bring actual blockbuster movies into the game. Saber Interactive is doing just that with Stuntman: Hollywood, an arcade-driving take on some of the best moments in movies, the car scenes.

During hands-on time with the game at Summer Game Fest, we got behind the wheel of scenes from movies like Fast & Furious and Back to the Future. Each level in the demo was a different sequence of stunts inspired from scenes in those respective properties. A level based on Fast & Furious might see us drifting through corners and narrowly avoiding cop cars, while Back to the Future has us driving around on two wheels and getting the car up to the movie’s iconic speed to activate practical effects. We need to be precise in our movements, as we are being judged on how well we performed the set stunts. Instructed to narrowly avoid a cop car, our points are calculated by how close we got to it during the scene. A UI element that has a green, orange, and red indicator is available to give us a better understanding of how close we are to the target perfect shot for the stunt.

This has advantages in other ways, like helping to telegraph where we might be expected to go after a jump because the green indicator is aligned to one side of the ramp. Score isn’t limited to these set stunts, allowing us to go for extra challenges or score by doing things like drifting in sections that didn’t have a marked drift stunt or keeping the perfect speed through a section with explosions going off around the car. It leaves room for self-expression in what could seem like a very scripted perfect route chase. It should also add some replay-ability and score chasing leaderboard potential.

Of course no Hollywood blockbuster is anything without its lead, and luckily the driving handling in Stuntman is in the starring role. A sim-cade racer it certainly isn’t, but its responsiveness and feel places it comfortably above the drive-ability of other arcade racing focused games these past few generations. Cars felt weighty, but a touch over agile, while still realistically responding to the physics of going over a jump or progressing through the tight confines of the play space. Cars were the only vehicles on offer in the demo, but motorcycles have already been shown as playable, and with the Universal partnership we could be looking at a few other modes of transportation making their way onto the set. Speaking of the sets, levels had a myriad of cinematography equipment placed around sets and setup in locations that would seemingly record the action for these movies. Unfortunately replays were not available in the demo to see how they handled the final footage and packaged it for the player, but we were assured that replays would be something viewable in the final version.

Stuntman: Hollywood doesn’t currently have a release date but is slated for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox.