Headhunter - On This Day

The creative director of the former Swedish studio Amuze enjoyed action films made in the 1980s and Paul Verhoeven's science fiction films so much that in 2002 he merged the two into his first video game - Headhunter.

His game, which came out for the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 consoles, is set in the near future in a city reminiscent of Los Angeles. In that universe, criminals pay for their crimes in the standard way - they spend some time in prison, but also with a somewhat unconventional approach - internal organs. Simply put, the prisoners participated in a kind of underwater gladiatorial games where the losers would surgically lose a certain organ for the benefit of richer and more powerful members of society.

 

The player got involved in the story as Mr. Jack Wade, who had just escaped from a secret lab but soon lost his footing and lost consciousness. The protagonist then wakes up in the hospital, and it is not clear to him why he lost his bounty hunter's license when he was the best in his business before all these unpleasant events. His interest in returning to business takes him on a journey of investigating the murder of his boss and founder of the Anti-Crime Network (ACN) company that catches criminals. It does this through a series of various tests in virtual reality.

The headhunter was on the trail of open-type games and could ride a motorbike from task to task. The shooting was also “modern and based on the use of the shelter. In addition to Jack Wade, the character of Angela Stern was also played in some sequences.

The headhunter picked up mostly solid ratings, and sales were good enough to justify making a sequel that came two years later. Unfortunately, that part was not so popular, and the Amuze studio closed its doors after it.