Newshunter 2 Game Review

BY: BRIAN ROBBINS  |  Advergame reviews, Advergames

Newshunter 2: Beat the Press is a new game on the Comedy Central website. The game is a real-time 3D Shockwave game.

Gameplay consists of the player first selecting their Comedy Central personality, then driving their news van to try to batter the enemy networks van into submission before time runs out.

The graphics on this game are okay, the initial interface uses photos of the personalities, which is good as it ties back into the Comedy Central branding. The game itself is a bland environment with an endless straight road filled with 6 or 7 different types of vehicles to dodge.

Gameplay is also okay. You press the gas and steer using the arrow keys and need to dodge the obstacle cars in order to catch up to the enemy news van. Once you do, you can ram the enemy to destroy them and pass the level.

What I liked: There is a relatively strong link between the Comedy Central brand and the game. There could definitely be more comedy, but overall this is just a quick run, that isn’t supposed to be deep or in-depth. In that regards it works.

What I didn’t like: While there are several things I didn’t like about this game, there is one problem that dwarfs all others. When the game initially loads, it displays two security popups as it loads in external ads and images from 3rd party servers. This does nothing but make the user wary about the content, and will destroy the experience for many users. For the most novice and paranoid users it will convince them to leave the game without ever playing. This is completely unacceptable for an Advergame and should not be tolerated for any reason.

Beyond that, I have a few other issues with this game. Initially I did not know what to do. I thought this was a race, but every time I got ahead of the enemy van, they got a speed boost and powered ahead of me. It took a couple plays to figure out that I should try to destroy the van instead. For games like this it is essential that the goals of the game are immediately obvious.

There’s absolutely no discernable difference between the first three levels. It looks like the same road, against the same enemy, which doesn’t leave me with enough reasons to stick around and try to win the game.

The very short music repeat loop also got annoying very quickly.

The page layout is also horrible. When I first visited the game was completely below the fold, with a huge blank space at the top. This turns out to be the space for the banner ad at the top to fill in as it expands. It appeared to have the same affect in IE as it did Firefox.

Overall: This is an okay game, better than some, but not as good as others. I don’t think it will stand out of the crowd which is a shame because Comedy Central has the right branding to make something that really turns a lot of heads.