Manhunter 2: San Francisco

The Good
Manhunter: San Francisco picks up where Manhunter: New York left off. The last game saw him chased Dr. Phil out of New York and the two attempt to fight it out on the other side of the States – in San Francisco. Now in the Manhunter series, we are able to explore one other city other than just NY.

The gameplay elements from the previous game are here. You can find information about people using MAD (Manhunter Assignment Device), track people throughout the city, and investigate bizarre deaths. Not only that, but you must also investigate why innocent people have been mutated into monsters and rats. There are lots of arcade sequences that you can play, and there are more challenging mazes that you will need to get through.

Your investigation takes three days to complete, but the tasks usually take much longer to accomplish. More often than not, I found that these tasks are more interesting than those in the previous game. A few tasks can often lead to danger. You may get eaten alive by a creature, for example, or bump into a hazard in the non-interactive sequences. As for the locations, I don't know whether they are real like those in the first game.

The quality of the sound and graphics in Manhunter can be traced back to the first game, where Sierra used their old-style AGI graphics, giving the game a 16-color palette. They still looked great during the 1987-89 era, and the graphics are drawn nicely, despite their pixellated edges. As for the sound, you will hear the exact sound effects as you heard from the first game, but the music is different, even though each piece doesn't last long.

The keyboard is only used to control the Manhunter's actions. You can see the Sierra mouse cursor during the game, but since this cursor is not used, players are expected to slowly perform their actions, usually by moving the cursor over to something interesting, then pressing [Return] to interact with it.

The Bad
The crap ten-second theme song is back. I expected the theme to be much longer in the second game, as this game is meant to be bigger than the first.

Some of the arcade sequences are fun, but they are quite hard to master. There are three settings that alter the difficulty of these sequences, and these are “Easy Arcade”, “Normal Arcade”, and “Hard Arcade”. I felt that they did not make a difference. So the user has no choice but to save/restore their games when they get further in the sequences.

Although there are no dificult mazes in the game, the one that I found a bit annoying was at the end, where you need to carefully move a drill through a maze full of lava, so that you don't fall into it, and have to start all over again. I like the last maze in the first game much better.

The Bottom Line
I usually hate it when the last game in a series has the words “To be continued...” in the ending, and the creators don't even bother to make just one more game just to complete the trilogy. The second game is an example of this. A third Manhunter game looked promising, but it ended up not being made, probably due to poor sales.

This game was made in 1989, so I expected to see this game made out of the SCI0 engine that Sierra used for many of their games of that year, such as Leisure Suit Larry 3 and Space Quest 3.

The second, and final, game in the Manhunter series is quite long, and the challenging mazes and arcade games should keep you hooked for a while. Too bad that Sierra still used their AGI engine back in 1989, when they knew straight away that the game would look better with their SCI0 engine.