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| IMPRESSIONS by Rafiki 03/11/2009, 11:42am PDT | ||||
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| BLOOD.
BLOOOOOOOD. I did not like it initially. The first level is a tutorial, and it interrupts you every 5 seconds to explain something, so it's hard to really get a feel for combat and get a good flow of action going. By level 2, I liked it a lot more! This was not the kind of beat-em-up I was expecting. It's not like a Final Fight or Streets of Rage where you walk from point A to point B and teach some PUNKS a lesson in good manners by using the bloody dismemberment method. Instead, you progress through a level by earning points. You earn points by hilariously murdering people. As you earn points, you meet different goals that do things like unlock weapons, unlock minigames, or unlock the boss fight. The levels are more like arenas, where they drop you in the middle of a section of the city and you wander around fucking everyone's shit up. Nothing really guides you to any particular part of the level, so it's up to you to wander around. I didn't realize this at first, so I spent several minutes killing people over and over at beginning of level 2 wondering when it was going to get more exciting. Actually, I lied about the guiding. When you unlock certain things, they appear at different places in the level so you have to use the minimap to run over to them. But it would have helped to know that right away. You only have about half a dozen moves, and much of the combat is figuring out how to use the environment to kill everybody. In that respect it kind of reminds me of that Sega Genesis game The Haunting where you play a ghost that has to possess household items to scare the shit out of people. Most of the fun is coralling people into different parts of the house so you can see what you can do with the environment, otherwise you're stuck in one part and it gets boring. SO: MOVE AROUND. EXPLORE. KILL PEOPLE. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT. WAYS I'VE KILLED PEOPLE: -slammed them into a spike rack ("rose bush"). -pulled them off and did it again -then again -and again -stabbed two swords into their chest, lifted them over my head, then pulled them out through their groin and head -threw them into a dumpster, which slammed closed and cut them in half -chainsaw all fuckin BRRVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVT through their body -threw them into spinning saw blades -threw them into spinning fan blades -twisted their head off. unfortunately it did not pop off like an uncorked champagne bottle, it just flopped lifelessly and hung by a few threads -bent them over backwards and ripped them in half -kicked them in front of a train -threw them into a jet engine -MAN DARTS -crushed them in a giant spiked press -and so on BAD THINGS: The camera is really not that good. All you can do is center it behind you or lock it on an enemy. Lock-on is worthless for anything other than boss fights. The announcers start repeating themselves on level 1. They're played by this guy and Bender from Futurama and they're at least well acted. They do have a ton of dialogue and new lines for new weapons, minigames, bosses, and ways you kill people, but it'll repeat. It hasn't bothered me, but you can turn it off in the options menu. It's supposedly only about 5 hours long, so I will probably finish it shortly. |
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