Headhunter is a recklessly ambitious game.
That's the best way I can sum it up.

The effort put into it can be immediately seen in the visuals, it doesn't look like a Dreamcast game.
Textures are clean and sharp, models look good, decent animation and smooth environments, and nice lighting effects. It's possibly the best looking Dreamcast game I've seen so far, I would often just wander around in rooms and look at all the small details and backdrops.
The game excels in atmosphere overall, the visuals, tone, and soundtrack perfectly fit together.

It's also noticeable in the story and writing and in this case that was one of the better aspects, it was entertaining throughout it's not the deepest story or anything but it has a strange satire/semi serous tone that makes it stand out, numerous cutscenes both pre rendered and live action.

The last overall positive aspect is the music by Richard Jaques, it adds a lot to the game. It's one thing that stands out in a good way.

The dev team simply tried to do too much, you have driving segments, stealth gameplay, third person shooting, VR missions, and various Resident Evil style puzzles crammed into a small game, as a result none of them are all that polished or deep.

The combat is not great, stealth take-downs wouldn't work most of the time, the enemies aim is terrible so the entire game I would just walk toward them while shooting and usually take no damage, instead of coming up with any strategy.
The boss fights were better but often were more of a DPS race. Targetting would often get stuck on objects or far enemies I didn't want to aim at. It was clunky but still fun in a mindless way, when the stealth worked and I could sneak up on enemies it was fun and trying to use mines and grenades strategically was satisfying, it was never hard enough to be frustrating and losing doesn't send the player back that far (most of the time).

I could definitely tell this was supposed to be an open mission based game, but something must have happened in development because the game has a pointless empty overworld to drive around in despite progress being linear.

They clearly had to cut back on this one a lot, yet confusingly they kept the open world hub anyway they seemed to really want to keep it in the game no matter the cost, and to make sure players are forced to explore it there is a driving exp system the prevents you from continuing until a certain number is reached, it's one of the strangest design decisions in a game I can think of in recent memory.

even the slightest graze with any obstacle makes you lose points, it's far too punishing this lead me to have to grind driving back and forth through an empty lot for about 30 minutes before I could finish the game.

This holds the game back a lot, it does add a bit of identity to it but maybe not in a good way.
I did enjoy wandering around in the hubworld just exploring sometimes.

To add to all of this the game is glitchy, new game plus softlocks itself, it's easy to clip in to some areas, a wall in the overworld has no collision, and I died while exiting areas or beating bosses several times leading to strange and funny results.

Near the end of a game I left a room I wasn't supposed to and found it couldn't be re-entered. I had to circle back around the route to get back in, an the event that stopped a bunch of instant kill lasers blocking the way forward wouldn't re activate, so I had softlocked my game at the very end.

In order to beat this game I had to resort to using an out of bounds glitch to walk around the blocked doors, it was incredibly easy to cause this softlock.

That's generally how this game is, poorly executed but almost never dull, it has what you might call Dreamcast era charm that keeps it from becoming boring sometimes ironically. Despite the problems I had it was worth sticking with this one, it wasn't too long either.

This game was awkward, a bit glitchy, but still a fun playthrough. I'd recommend this to people that want something a bit experimental that has an aged feel to it, like a time capsule representing the late dreamcast era.
People with less patience for unintuitive control and lack of polish should definitely avoid this game.

Headhunter is one of those games that actually pissed me off enough to make me want to quit in the middle of it; in fact remember it quite clearly, it was while I kept hitting random shit with my motorcycle as a timer was counting down. I almost did it, I almost turned the game off forcibly and just called it a day. The rare thing is that I decided to just hold that anger back and continue with the game. I have to say that I glad I did.

If I want to be really reductive, I would just say that this game is Metal Gear Solid - at home. The story aims for a similar kind of political conspiracy, but in a zany funky way that's closer to Hollywood of its era. It has dialogues presented in a codec-esque manner, but with only a fraction of the runtime, and nowhere near as iconic. There's even enemies cosplaying as genome soldiers later on. There's a lot more to say about this, but you get the point already.

From very early on, you can already see weird angle that the story is going for. Apparently the world is pretty obsessed with preserving human organs, but this obviously can't happen if we keep having ballistic weapons, so there's a new neurological-based weapons now that disable the human nervous system instead. This, and many other odd ideas are presented in the satirically straightforward way of live action actors performing in-world TV news broadcasts, keeping their best smiles and scripted jokes for the whole world to see. The world itself is already interesting enough, but the presentation takes it up a notch.

The plot itself only gets truly good later on, and the writing is pretty okay. The main two characters have a tolerable chemistry, and the villains are quite silly, so that's good enough for me, haha.

Gameplay wise, it's pretty much a third person shooter with light puzzle-exploration elements, which involves searching for objects in the environment to open locked areas. There's apparently a stealth system since the game's challenges teach you it, but honestly its non-existent, even when the story seems to head into the direction of requiring it. It's a good thing though, because the stealth challenges are incredi-bad. I got used to the shooting controls pretty quick, and had a decent time with it. Even the enemy AI seems to be pretty okay, in terms of not being pushovers.

I did not, however, have fun with the motorcycle controls. In between missions you are required to drive around the city to get to new places, and in order to progress, you need to earn enough skill points by riding really fast without colliding with things. The controls themselves are just dumb, I don't get why your character have to lift the motorcycle up each time you rev the thing up, it messes with your trajectory and it always makes it feel like I'm on a rebellious stallion that wants to kill me. The collision system can also really frustrate at times, it's not consistent in how it registers hits and how much it impacts your speed. There's not too many motorcycle sections, but there's one big story section that really tests your patience (the aforementioned timer based section), and I can't quite shake the psychic damage it did on me.

In the first half the game kinda tried to show its influences in a subtler way, but the second half just went crazy with it, and it's for the better. The second half had more interesting level design, and the story is at its most fun moments too. There's even a very noticable Resident Evil vibe to the last level.

There's also boss fights but I think most of them are just okay, it's definitely very MGS-esque in terms of how it feels to play them. The final boss fight is pretty great though. And the music is good, I like the epic feel of the main motif. Also, this game has some of the funniest game overs I've seen in a while, sometimes the game over screen will just immediately cut the sound of your character's death yelp, and it's pretty entertaining.

Despite an earnest attempt, Headhunter never quite reaches the heights of its influences for even a second, even if there's some potential here. But if you're okay with that, and willing to be patient with the game's mechanics, you'll probably get a kick out of this.

It has admittedly been a long time since I played this, but I just happened to see the alarmingly low Backloggd score and felt compelled to do my part to bolster the game's reputation a smidgen.

I LOVED this game back in the day. I got it day one for the Dreamcast as I remember there being a fair bit of buzz around it, and it mostly delivered. It was definitely influenced by Robocop and Metal Gear Solid, and it wore those influences on its sleeve. An ambitious game - maybe too ambitious for its own good - but for a Shenmue fan who wanted more adventures on a similar scale, Headhunter was a godsend. Yes it's derivative, yes it's a jack of all trades that casts too wide a net, and yes the motorcycle riding is utter tosh. But I respect this game for being only too happy to go big. It's very cinematic and movie-esque game in its presentation, which will turn some people off but delight others.

Would love to revisit this someday.