BHunter Action categoryShooter category

Box art for BHunter, courtesy of MobyGames.

We will never get flying cars, at least in the form that every sci-fi movie suggests. Giving everyone a tiny plane is a regulatory and safety nightmare, so until we’re all connected to an automated driving grid, we have to rely on Back to the Future: Part II for the second-hand experience.

BHunter, an action game by InterActive Vision, nails that fantasy to the exclusion of everything else attractive about a future setting. BHunter‘s hovercar handles so well that it props up almost the whole game – except for its scattered narrative. The game wants the background of a dark city where no authority can be trusted without figuring out what role you play in that society.

BHunter‘s future is, like many, vaguely dystopian. In 2098, a massive city teeters on the edge of total chaos as criminals, mobsters, and arms dealers run rampant over the authorities. The police have turned to the BHunters, a loose federation of bounty hunters, to keep the city under control. As a BHunter, you take missions from any interested party hoping to bring order to their neighborhood, whatever their definition of order might be.

Screenshot from BHunter

Dense, electronic, and falling apart: it must be the future

The city embodies every cyberpunk trope. Giant LED billboards line the streets, and sprawling industrial sites on the outskirts keep the glitzier downtown running. If you look to the skies, huge capital ships loom overhead. The game owes an obvious debt to Blade Runner and invokes its visually striking run-down future aesthetics to great effect, especially in how artfully it uses low-resolution textures and models. (The downtown and financial regions of the city, with their beat-up, lit-up skyscrapers and mossy tunnels, looks particularly great.) But it strips those visuals of their meaning. A futuristic mall in the same city as a Kowloon Walled City-esque shantytown should raise questions about social inequality (as in the best cyberpunk works), but here, it just looks cool.

Still, cool might be enough. BHunter instead focuses on the joy of traversing that sort of world, and it really delivers.

The game’s success rests with your BHunter craft, armed with guns, missiles, and a bottomless fuel supply. Piloting the car captures the awe promised by countless similar vehicles in film. As you swoop through the streets, the game will subtly level your heading, keeping you on-course and allowing you to drive more like a regular car. Whipping around a corner at full speed in pursuit of a suspect is an absolute rush, and BHunter gets the feel so right. All of the game’s strengths build off this base.

In fairness, the controls seem slippery at first. BHunter nears unplayability when using a mouse or keyboard rather than a gamepad, and of the game’s three difficulty levels (with escalating speed and looseness), only the easiest, slowest car feels manageable. (It’s uncertain who is supposed to be able to play on the hardest setting.) Combat is often frustratingly inaccurate for these reasons, especially given other cars’ nimbleness and tendency to U-turn on a dime. This does match the accuracy of an action movie shootout but becomes less endearing the third or fourth time your expensive, uncommon homing missiles or similar weapons spiral in the wrong direction.

Screenshot from BHunter

Nothing takes out suspects faster than a steady aim

The game compensates here with rechargeable ammunition and shields, letting you step away from the action if you need a breather. Your vehicle can take a few beatings before you have to restart a chapter, so you’re rarely in danger of failing because of the imprecise controls. (Navigation is a greater challenge: your car’s on-board map can help find turns on your street, but it can’t pinpoint specific entry points to the metro tunnels, for instance, or the repair shop.)

Once you get a handle on your car, the game’s pleasures and texture naturally reveal themselves. BHunter has a loose open-ended structure pushed along by bounties you receive. As you trek from one zone to another along the dim City Ring highway system, you notice the little details that bring the world alive. Each area of the city has a similar structure – hall-like streets with side tunnels – but a distinguishing flavor. The geometric girders at the Space Port have such different sightlines than the Industrial Complex’s tight passageways or the low-rise warehouses at The Docks.

Random cars flying through these boroughs may be tagged as suspects, and other police or BHunters will pursue them and end up in their own firefights that cause collateral damage. You can join in if you want a share of the reward money. The police will fine you if you kill an innocent bystander, like a pizza delivery truck, and at some point you need to swing by the bail office to pay your dues. These little touches give the city a character and an ecosystem beyond its generic cyberpunk roots.

The world isn’t defined nearly enough, though. As BHunter progresses, its story tries to gin up intrigue between the forces fighting for control of the city, and it wrecks the loosely established dynamics that hold the setting together.

Screenshot from BHunter

The battle between police and gangs just sort of spins in circles

Your missions usually come from police and ask you to track down criminals, which is appropriate for a bounty hunter trying to maintain law and order. Soon, however, you receive an assignment from Mr. Luciano, a mob boss who controls much of the city and runs the Grand Vegas casino district; he also wants you to wipe out criminals, still something befitting a BHunter. But then he asks you to kill police and fellow BHunters to allow him to continue his criminal exploits. This sets up a provocative conflict of interest between your job and your principles. You’re a gun for hire, so are you willing to kill law enforcement to make some extra money?

BHunter doesn’t ask that question and doesn’t even consider it a possibility. Every mission needs to be completed to continue the game, no matter how out-of-character it is, and no one seems to notice the dissonance. After completing one of Mr. Luciano’s jobs to kill two police offers, you rack up over $100,000 in fines and get a bounty placed on your head. Immediately following this, the same police captain who branded you “BHunter scum” and called for your head assigns you another peacekeeping mission elsewhere in the city.

Nobody seems to care that you’re playing both sides, to the point where crossing that mandated moral red line has little meaning. Not until halfway through the game do Luciano, the police, or the BHunters bring up your unscrupulous practices, then quickly dismiss them. The BHunter dispatcher tips you off to police malpractice, and even after the police set up an ambush so an underground gang can kill you, they continue to request your help. And of course, you accept.

Everyone seems to have the memory of a goldfish, and it ruins any investment you might have in playing bounty hunter. BHunter clearly has room for a sly moral sensibility, as seen in a mission where the mayor has you assassinate a politician and acknowledges the public risk it exposes you to. But the game has no interest in applying that beyond a rudimentary, incoherent idea of a crime thriller. The roles of supporting players aren’t built well enough for the twists and turns amount to anything.

The developers recognized the allure of a mercenary anti-hero who fights for and against a corrupt government, but the execution of that concept confuses your relationship with the city so deeply that your job doesn’t make sense anymore. For a game about interplay between factions, world-building can’t be an afterthought.

Screenshot from BHunter

A loop around the City Ring defines the best of BHunter

The game reaches its potential when it can ignore the escalating stupidity of the story. Riding the City Ring between the Central Stadium and the Old Bronx is superb, mundane roleplay – watching the other cars glide through the poorly lit concrete tunnels, trying not to bang your head on the ceiling, and swinging around when a fugitive passes in the other lane. It’s both calming and empowering, like a rough-and-tumble future crime job should be.

But even then, it only holds up in small bursts. The assignments are too similar, despite the occasional variance where you have to destroy an antennae or a suspicious shipping container. If you’ve played one chapter, you don’t need to play another. The game begs for a compelling narrative frame to hold long-term interest beyond jumping mission-to-mission.

The flying car feels so great, and it lets you inhabit a convincing, unambitious cyberpunk setting. But if you’re to become an unprincipled bounty hunter in that world, BHunter needs to rework its narrative and spotty moral ambiguity. Imagine a version of the game with intelligible politics where your double-crosses matter and you get to chase gangsters through a mining facility. A ride as good as BHunter deserves both.

A note about compatibility

BHunter has extreme difficulty running on basically any computer. The game only works as intended on Windows 98; under any other system, it crashes immediately, sends back an error about playing the CD audio track, or freezes shortly after you shoot a suspect (that last one may be an oversensitive form of copy protection). Although it’s possible to run the game in a virtual machine, most Windows 98 virtual machines can’t take advantage of hardware acceleration, so the graphics look much poorer under those.

An anonymous, uncredited person has modified the game to ignore the audio warnings and fix other compatibility problems. This version seems to run fine on Windows XP through Windows 10. For convenience, I’ve attached the new executable file here. This can replace BHUNTER.exe in an installed copy of the game.

13 comments

  • Hunter

    Do you know anything about Crime Cities? It’s an almost identical game from Poland that came out less than a year later.

  • Phil "Shadsy" Salvador

    I hadn’t heard of it before, and you’re right, the similarities are striking! http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/crime-cities/screenshots

    Both of them were on the heels of G-Police, another similar game by a European studio. http://www.mobygames.com/game/g-police/screenshots I couldn’t guess why there was a late-90s wave of urban cyberpunk law enforcement hovercar shooters. Was The Fifth Element that popular?

  • Patrick “Foxy” M.

    I used to love this game! Your article makes me remember why i never knew what the hell was going on with the storyline when I was playing it. It was fun blowing up all the other cars.. thanks for the nostalgia!

  • Marco

    Thank you for mentioning the issue about Win98 and cd music. I was getting no music under WinME and kept worrying my cd was bad but now I can finally have peace of mind.

    I’m currently playing through this with my sidewinder stick and Im having a great time.

  • asdfghjkl;' asdfghjkl;'

    I imagine you can probably just torrent Windows 98, install it on a USB drive and then play it natively.

  • Dredd

    I played the demo of this as a kid and it’s been stuck in my mind ever since. It was a surprise finding it again as I read through your entire blog

  • Daniel

    This game had some kind of beta demo leak back in the day. I remember it very well, it was the time when people used to download any files they could get their hands on from the more, ahem, questionable corners of the web and swap them at school. There was this BHUNTER game file that seemed really more like a tech demo than anything else, but intrigued me mainly because I couldn’t find out more about the game.

    I downloaded the official demo now, and it seems very close to the state this version I remember was in. You got to fly around in the same level, but unlike the demo, it didn’t have a menu or dialogue. It might have also been a bit less polished visually.

    It’s funny, some 20 years ago you almost couldn’t visit a “gamez” website without that file being there, and now I can’t find any info about its existence anymore. I’m sure it’s still on some of my archived harddrives.

  • Daniel

    Thanked be file search, I found it. A little 4 MB set of “BHUNTER.DAT” and “BHUNTER.EXE”, not even a little readme.

    It drops you straight into the demo, with a crude game logo and control instructions, although there is an InterActiVision logo in the bottom right. The visual difference to the final demo and game is pretty big, the build must be a lot earlier than I thought.

    The level is pretty small but has some traffic, and you can’t do much more than fly around in it for a bit. Which is pretty fun, though, I have to say, the physics and sounds are pretty satisfying. You can shoot lasers or missiles, although they don’t do anything to the other cars. Some of the AI vehicles are actually chasing and shooting at each other. You get to play around with a few nice camera perspectives, too, including a very crude cockpit view.

    From the looks of it, this was probably meant for the press.

    I tried to link some screenshots but apparently the anti-spam system doesn’t want me to.

  • Phoenix

    I loved this game! It held a lot of firsts for me; first map, assignments, flyer, shooter and being a fugitive. It’s also the first game I ever beat. I didn’t even realize it until I did it again. I had just graduated from my first ‘console’, an NES, to my first ‘real’ computer, which replaced my Tandy computer.
    Once you memorize the map, it’s really just run n gun. Wow, that’s over 20 years ago. A blast from the past.✌️

  • Doug

    I remember playing the demo and I found it cool that I could go in a corner at the Chinatown and glitch throught the wall and actually explore the infinite space! There was also a car on the ground of the City Ring… If you find this version please let me know. I want to do glitch again, but looks like in the full version I can’t.
    I don’t know if there’s multiples demos but I can’t find it and I can’t do it in the demos I downloaded

  • Tim

    I played this game a lot. I also had the beta demo, which was just a blue car (not the barletta) if I remember correctly..
    I cannot find that beta demo anywhere now..
    If someone has it, if you would be so kind to share it, I’d be very grateful!!

    In the official release you can still get in outer space, by taking the rollercoaster in Grand Vegas at the right place close to the edge of the forcefield, so it releases you back above the forcefield in outer space.
    Greetings!

  • Tim

    So after many moons of searching, I found a very early alpha release on the Internet Archive, on an old Warez disk! However this version seems even earlier than the one I was referring to..
    So there does seem to be multiple alpha/beta leaks of this game.

    The search continues..!

  • Tim

    So a year later, I have found the ‘car on the floor of city ring’ beta version of Bhunter, on an old 404 Jogos ISO on the internet archive:

    Beta (September 98)
    https://ia601303.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/33/items/digerati-404-jogos-vol.-8/Digerati%20404%20Jogos%20-%20Vol.8.iso

    Alpha (July 98)
    https://ia804503.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/26/items/topgame8/CD%20TOPGAMES%20%238%20%281998%29%20-%20RTG008%20-%20Editora%20Escala%20-%20Sofitori%20-%20Microservice%20%5Btopgame8%5D.iso

    This one is extremely close to the version I had, so who knows how many versions are out there.. I’m happy with the Alpha, Beta and Release versions I have, but will do some more searching in my spare time 🙂

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