Stuntman Hollywood is a genius idea with a massive amount of replayability

A new Stuntman game, the first one in 19 years, was one of the last things I expected to be revealed at PlayStation's summer showcase. The more I thought about it, though, the more it became clear that Stuntman Hollywood is a genius idea. A nostalgic racing series that is good for both casual and hardcore fans, which utilizes Universal's near-endless suite of IPs, is such a smart game to develop.

I spoke to Todd Hollenshead, Saber Interactive's Head of Publishing, and Tim Willits, Chief Creative Officer, about the process behind the racing game's conception, and it's fascinatingly simple. "Literally, there was this database you could search through all the names of all the different IPs," Willits said about Saber's time under the Embracer group banner. "And it's kind of like, whoa, Stuntman, that's interesting," he continued, suggesting Saber stumbled across the idea for Stuntman Hollywood when looking through what they had access to.

Still, they had to partner with Universal, having already worked closely with them on the Turok and Jurassic Park games. Hollenshead said "when we went to Universal, they were like, 'we've got 1,000 movies, like, take your pick,' and because we were using slivers of them, like it's not a Fast and Furious game. It's Fast and Furious; it's Back to the Future; it's Miami Vice; it's Earthquake; it was great because the franchise owners thought it was cool."

And that's probably the most exciting aspect of Stuntman Hollywood. During my hands-on time with the game at SGF, I played levels from all of the films Hollenshead mentions, and it's wonderful to live out both iconic scenes from billion-dollar blockbusters and reimaginings of oft-forgotten cult classics like Earthquake.

It's a simple game. You jump into a car as the resident Stuntman erm… stuntman, and the director tells you what to do as you speed through the set. Get as close as you can to that parked car, take that jump as high as you can, or nail that drift between parked police cruisers. It's fast-paced, chaotic, and extremely nostalgic. There's not a whole lot that's new for the series; you'll know what you're doing if you've played the previous game - it's the IP tie-ins that are the new selling point.

The cars feel great, whether that's the iconic DeLorean or Fast and Furious' muscle cars, so you're able to weave between obstacles with ease. There's a level of precision that's needed, but that only increases as you try to hit high scores and get all of the stars in each scene.

Both the original Stuntman game and Ignition were intensely tough games. "It's important for us to make this as broad a base as possible," Willits tells me, but that doesn't mean the game is easy. While getting through a level with a mediocre score is simple enough, hitting green on every stunt in every scene will be reserved for only the most dedicated of players. Hollywood has a huge amount of replay value, not just for the hits of nostalgia, but to try and better your score again and again. Since it's quite a simple game at heart, replayability is vital to making the game something you stick with and don't just delete once you've beaten every level.

Getting that difficulty balance right wasn't easy, though. The developers needed to ensure Hollywood isn't as hard as the original game and not too easy for embattled racing fans. I spoke to Hollenshead and Willits about this to understand how tough it was for them.

"It's funny you said that, because Todd will back me up on this. We have had so many discussions about that exactly, and it is tricky, because then there are people that say 'I gotta get all the stars, I got this,' but sometimes, for normal muggles it may be too difficult, so we've been spending an enormous amount of time balancing the game.

"We don't want to discourage people from having fun, you know, so we have the different difficulty settings, but then you can go kind of hardcore, so we have the director scenes, and then we have some free-form stunts, so for folks like you that want to maybe have a little more challenge, we have those opportunities."

I'm excited to get to grips with the challenging side of Stuntman Hollywood in full, and I want to see how many unexpected movies appear in the game. Stuntman is one of the most unique racing series ever released, and I'm glad it's making a comeback.