Unfortunately I’m too young to fully appreciate the level of detail and homage paid to the classic television series.  I can barely remember watching repeats when I was a kid.  However Empire Interactive made sure to add authentic amounts of seventies style music full of funky bass lines, wah wah guitars and weird synth sounds.  There is extra jive-talking lingo pumped into the narrations performed by Antonio Fargas and of course players get to drive the familiar Ford Gran Torino also known as the striped tomato.  Fans of the series, or even gamers who dig violent shoot em up police car chase scenes in general will find plenty of excitement, at first.

To play the game you must drive around Bay City and complete a primary objective.  In the story mode each level is presented in the form of an episode.  There is a quick narration by Huggy Bear to set up the situation before you take control.  You must defeat each episode in order to unlock the next.  These episodes are branched into seasons.  In order to unlock a new season you must achieve certain goals within each episode.  You are awarded different police badges that are based on your final viewer rating. 

There is no damage bar or life meter present in Starsky & Hutch.  The only way to lose is one of two ways, if you don’t complete a primary objective or your viewer rating drops to zero.  The viewer rating is perhaps the coolest part to this game.  The VR is always dropping and it represents the level of interest the audience has toward your driving performance.  In order to boost the VR rating you must speed off ramps and blow stuff up or smash into park benches and streetlamps.  There are also power up icons and bonus tokens located throughout each level.  Some icons provide better tire grip or enable the siren.  Other power ups automatically punch up the VR rating when you fly through them after rocketing off some conveniently placed ramp.  There are tokens which unlock different cars and other items that give you heavier weaponry for a limited amount of time.

I raced through Starsky & Hutch switching between a keyboard, a Microsoft Sidewinder gamepad and a Gravis Xterminator.  The gamepads were pretty responsive and I was able to remap the button configuration.  The keyboard however just seemed too sluggish for me when I tried to make all those wheel screeching turns.  All in all there isn’t a whole lot to do.  You can go back and play through episodes you’ve defeated already in order to find all the secret locations, stunts and tokens.  You can also drive around in free roam mode inside different cars as they are unlocked.  There is also a two player mode that allows one person to drive while the other shoots.  There are some good action qualities here, but the game becomes difficult and repetitious quickly.

Gameplay: 7
There are plenty of secret icons, tokens and power ups to find and the city is large enough where it manages to stay interesting and generally look diverse.  The loud skids and crazy stunts keep the action coming, but the constant shooting just becomes tiresome. 

Graphics: 7
The visuals resemble a sort of cartoonish approach that never really feels grounded in reality.  The environments are large and do a  decent job with buildings and store fronts.  Some of the character models are week and blocky and pedestrian cars look very plain..

Sound: 8
Antonio Fargas does a good job as Huggy Bear and the other voiceovers are good.  Some of the dialogue gets a bit silly, but this is a seventies style arcade game after all.  The music has high quality and if you like seventies funk you’ll be in heaven.

Difficulty: Hard
Control is easy enough, but getting through the city and maintaining a high viewer rating is quite difficult at times.  I had to play through each episode many times before I was able to unlock the next one and move on.  For an arcade driver that requires the player to unlock the cooler portions of the game the difficulty should have been a little more forgiving.  Or maybe I just suck. 

Concept: 7 
Based on the television show, and it represents the funk-tified seventies well.  Of course the seventies were before my time and that’s probably the case with most gamers out there so the amount of authenticity to the show may be lost on many of us.

Overall: 7
This game has decent graphics with fast paced action arcade gameplay that offers a bit of flash and some cool stunt work, but it gets monotonous and runs thin in story and character depth.