Fugitive Hunter is a first-person shooter, like many others, only slightly more so. In it, you're Jake Seaver, a military operative and Congressional Medal of Honor winner, currently employed by the United States government as a sort of freelance bounty hunter. Seaver, who is not only allowed but encouraged to use insane amounts of lethal force, is tasked with bringing down the members of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, one at a time.

Happily, it turns out that these Ten Most Wanted are in rough league with each other; one guy works for a drug runner, who buys his stuff from a guy in South America, who's working for a local druglord, who in turn is in league with a Parisian terrorist, and on down the line. At the top of this ridiculous little pyramid, squatting inside a cave on the Afghani border and surrounded by a generation of fanatic terrorists, is one Osama bin Laden.

Fugitive Hunter's central hook, as it moves into the media exposure stage, is likely to be the presence of bin Laden as the game's final boss. According to one of the development movies on the disc, bin Laden is in the game because he was #1 on the Most Wanted list back in 1999, when the game was initially in development; it's purest coincidence that he'd move into the national spotlight between then and now.

I'll admit to being slightly cynical about the idea; it seems a bit bizarre and vicarious to me to cash in on the funneled rage and hatred of a nation by releasing a game where bin Laden and Al-Qaida form the final challenge. It feels a little bit too much like a marketing tactic.

What's even weirder is Fugitive Hunter itself, which is surprisingly decent. I was sort of operating on an unspoken bias, where a game with this kind of instant controversy packed right in was going to be a blatant cash run, with all the gameplay, graphics, and phoned-in sound that title would indicate. People will buy this just for the chance to empty a rocket launcher into Al-Qaida, so it didn't really have to be good.

Fugitive Hunter, really, reminds me of nothing so much as the most successful Quake mod ever. It has a few of the trappings of the shooters of yesteryear, like ammo and armor scattered everywhere, smaller health kits that can bring your stamina above 100% (to a maximum of 125%), "super armor" that boosts you to 200%, weapons that thumb their noses in the general vicinity of physics, and a near-total lack of environmental damage. In the right stages, it even has giant barrels full of diesel fuel, conveniently placed so that a few bullets at the right time can send your enemies flying.

But more to the point, it's lacking a lot of the options you can find in newer FPSes. Gone are things like friendly CPU soldiers, squad-based combat, most environmental damage, and unarmed bystanders, and, really, good riddance to them. The game really does feel like the laundry list of improvements that you wanted, when you were playing FPSes five or six years ago.

As a matter of fact, everyone in this game is a lot more jooky than usual. Sure, you have the occasional mook whose idea of combat prowess is to stand there and empty an assault rifle in your general direction, but most of them are smart enough to try and dodge. An average goon can be expected to lay down cover fire, dive out of the way while shooting wildly, or shift from position to position to screw up your headshots.

I'm told that Black Ops hired the Matrix stunt players to do the motion-capturing for Fugitive Hunter, and the visuals reflect it. A wild dive has the body language to it of a desperate, all-or-nothing dodge, with the enemy's full weight thrown in that direction. Terrorists move carefully to lay down barrages of gunfire, carefully creeping out from behind cover. People don't just fall over in this game; they collapse into boneless heaps, or ride the shockwave of an explosion like flaming rag dolls, or dance in panic as they're engulfed in a stream of burning napalm.

The enemy terrorists also tend to start off strewn around a room, perfectly placed to catch you in a crossfire, and they've got ears like bats. I swear they hear your heartbeat or something, as they'll notice you even if you're sneaking up on them from behind, a hundred yards or so away. While Seaver's pretty durable (incoming damage is taken off his armor first, as opposed to depleting both his health and armor at the same time), and can carry around his own medical supplies, you'll be surprised how fast a bunch of guys can strip away your full stamina meter.

To fight back against these guys, who're five or six different flavors of international terrorist, Seaver's equipped with a small but versatile arsenal of weapons, which he can carry all at once. You have your standard pistol, shotgun, and assault rifles, yeah, but Seaver also gets a flamethrower, rocket launcher, sniper rifle, and the best grenade launcher ever. Seriously. It's got great range, you can detonate the grenades in mid-air with a press of the X button, the bounces actually go where you'd kind of expect them to, and you can even get TV-guided grenades, for the kamikaze pilot in you.

Each of the weapons has a secondary fire mode, which is usually just a melee attack. (This should not be undervalued, as there is deep and technical comedy involved with cracking an RPG tube over someone's head.) Some aren't; the tactical shotgun has a flare tube attached, which can blind and stun enemies within a certain range, and the Dragon flamethrower fires off wild jets of long-range flame, like a slow and unofficial grenade.

The problems here are kind of obvious. If I'm hunting down a middle-aged drug dealer, and I--totally by accident, of course--detonate half a dozen grenades against his forehead, he'll still have enough fight in him to bust out serious karate moves on me. He won't even take the cigar out of his mouth.

It'd be nice if I could kneecap the guy. That's all I'm saying. The Wanted posters say "dead or alive," but are silent on the subjects of folding, spindling, tearing, or mutilating.