Sometime during my twenty-second decapitation, it dawned on me that I still had no clue what James Earl Cash was actually locked up for. I know that's such a laughably pointless thing to hang up on when you're painting a Jackson Pollock with a guy's brains, but given that Cash's first act of onscreen violence has him casually slipping a plastic bag over a dude's head, you can't help but wonder what kind of man he was before being thrown into the slammer. Cash kills with such ease and finesse that it wouldn't be much of a stretch to assume that the man's dry cleaning bills far exceed his rent. Which is an interesting thought to say the least, because in a genre populated by grizzled ex-cops, battle-hardened soldiers and crowbar-wielding physicists, it's easy to get used to the whole "lone hero against unfathomable evil" deal, but it's not too often that a horror game places you in the shoes of a man more fit for inclusion on the FBI's "most wanted". After all - you don't get the death penalty for parking tickets, do you? At the end of the day, Manhunt's about a bad man doing very bad things to very bad people; it's a grim game overflowing with blood, guts and gristle, wrapped up in a grainy visual style reminiscent of the nastiest 'video nasties' and some of the smoothest stealth gameplay you'll ever experience. Cash may be a bad man, but he's pretty damn good at what he does.
