Cam's Eye View: Beatdown: Fists of Vengeance for the PS2 review

What games do you think of when you look at the beat ‘em up genre? First, you got your 2D beat ‘em ups that took place on a 2-dimensional plane. When I think of those kinds of games, I think of games like Final Fight, Knights of the Round, King of Dragons, Streets of Rage, Ninja Warriors, Kung Fu, Splatterhouse, TMNT Turtles in Time, and many other classic beat ‘em up games. Sadly, the 3D beat ‘em up genre doesn’t really have a lot of good games in that genre. Of course, we have the awesome Yakuza series for this answer. However, we usually think about bad or just average (some slightly above average) games that really come to mind in this genre. The games I can think of are The Bouncer, Final Fight Streetwise, and you get the idea. The 3D beat ‘em up genre isn’t that good. It isn’t the genre’s fault. It’s just hard to make a good 3D beat ‘em up. I recently was watching a video about 200 PS2 games and I saw one that caught my eye and it happened to be a 3D beat ‘em up. I put it on my Gamefly.com list and I rented it. The game in question is what people consider to be an underrated gem known as Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance for the PS2 and Xbox. Made by our now defunct friends from Cavia, who made Nier, Beat Down is yet another attempt to try and make a 3D platformer, and from the big name reviews, I could see I was going down a bumpy road ahead. However, I only read the reviews to see what I was getting into. It is my turn to see what I think about the game. This is my review of Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance.

            The story is about 5 different characters. You can choose one of them, and mostly you will probably start out with the titular Irish character, Raven. You find out that one of the other 4 characters has betrayed you during a mission. It is up to you to find out who betrayed you and to take down the big mob boss that runs the city named Zanetti and beat him down to the ground with vengeance. Normally, I would save the bad stuff for later in the review, but man, when I turned on the game and played through it for a few hours, the story is utter crap and is ultimately pointless, with bland characters and voice acting that is just awful. I will go into deeper detail later in the review. All you need to know is that the game starts out bad, and it just gets worse story wise. Just a heads up, I might trickle bad thoughts about this game throughout the review so don’t be surprised by me bashing the game even before I talk about the bad.

            The gameplay is like a weak version of Yakuza or God Hand. That is saying something since the last time I played it, I didn’t like it, but that game is for another review. The gameplay is basically a free roaming beat ‘em up with some interesting things thrown in that that were poorly executed. The main meat of the game is, of course, beating random thugs into the ground, and after the fight, stealing from them. However, you can do multiple things besides beating thugs into the ground. One thing you can do is recruit the thugs into joining you, or putting them on call just in case your other teammates get their pants knocked off. You can also rob from them, and get information from them, though the information is pretty useless. There is one thing you do actually have to be careful about. Above your health bar, you have two meters that stand for your awareness by gangs and the police. This means that you have to be careful how many times you beat people up, and well, that just seems really stupid. To get around this however, you can also buy different clothes, and oddly enough, plastic surgery, and make yourself unnoticeable. If you are however noticeable by both groups of enemies, you will automatically get into fights. There are also one-on-one fights that I guess are supposed to be boss fights, but they play like broken versions of Virtual Fighter. In the end, this game does try to break things up a bit with a beat ‘em up style gameplay that makes you level up and gain more combos with stealth, and squad-based fighting, but they ultimately fail in multiple areas.

            This is a hard area to go through in this review since I don’t really have a lot of nice things to say about the presentation of the game. The graphics are muddy, grainy, and way too dark. Before even playing the game, I tried to make the game brighter, but in the end I couldn’t. The really only good thing I could say is, well, the main character is original with his accent…he is Irish…. for some reason…Anyway, back to the review. The voice acting is terrible. I will say my reason in the next paragraph. The music is standard and not very memorable in the least.

            I probably should have left all my complaints here, but I will explain in better detail what is horribly wrong with this game! Since I already talked about the graphics, I’ll move on. The voice acting is BAD! Everyone, especially the guys, sound the same, and they sound like Steve Blum voices them all. This is kind of like two of the main characters in Vanquish. The AI is simply and utterly stupid. I mean, they are really dumb, both ally and enemy AI! Yeah, the AI will throw a few punches here and there, but they will mostly stand still and not help at all, and the same with the enemies. The camera is awkward! It is way too close to your character and this ends up hiding hidden enemies. The hiding system with the thugs and police is utter garbage! It is only for the sake of buying new clothes and plastic surgery. At the end of the day, you look like Tim Curry from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I mean, it’s like Cavia took the bare basics of all of the gameplay mechanics above, and well, didn’t really improve on them. Even after playing this game for a few minutes, I didn’t care about the story. I said to myself that I should play further, and I did, and boy, am I sorry that I did.

            This game is garbage, plain and simple. There is nothing properly polished about this game, and anyone who considers this an underrated gem is probably in denial at how bad this game is. I mean this is one of the worst! Bland characters, bland story, awful gameplay, and all a complete mess. If you want to play a good 3D beat ‘em up, go play the Yakuza series and God Hand. That is weird since, like I said, God Hand isn’t my game, but after this game I would prefer God Hand to this. As with most games I think are just awful, it will end up on my black list of just overall poor games.

This game gets a 2 out of 10.

Cam's Eye View: Under the Skin for the PS2 review

Hey everyone, I must apologize right now for saying that Chulip was the weirdest game I have ever played. Now, I won’t hang or electrocute myself for my screw-up, but I will tell you guys about a very unknown video game made by Capcom. I will warn you though that there are not enough therapists in the world to solve what mental problem this game has. So then, I guess you’re wondering what game I am talking about? It’s a chaotic mental case of a game simply known as Under the Skin for the PS2. This little gem of a game is basically yet another over-the-top weird Japanese game that somehow got past the psyche screen. There are not enough medical pills to cure what kind of madness this game brings onto our mental stability. Let’s dive into this mental case of a game, and see what makes it tick.

The story of Under the Skin is about a blue alien named Cosmi, who is traveling to earth in a ritual that he must do to become a great warrior. He accidentally crashes into a satellite and lands on earth. His goal on the planet is to cause as much chaos and mischief as possible. It’s a cute little story, but it seemed like not a lot of work went into it, but I’ll talk about it later.

The gameplay in Under the Skin is hard to explain. It says on Wikipedia that it’s an action adventure game, but it’s more along the lines of stealth, action, and mini-games mixed together. There are about 8 levels, and some of them share the same goal, like collect 500 on your own or with another alien, get more coins than the other alien, team up to take down Nemesis from the Resident Evil game, and others. The main goal is to pretty much collect coins. The way you do this is to take a human disguise and use multiple array of weapons to get coins from the humans, like rocket launchers, elephants, pins, bowling balls, T-rex, laser guns, shotguns, hula hoops, and you get the idea. There are a lot of weapons you can use, and you somewhat have to be tactical on how you tackle each level. There is also a multiplayer mode and a co-op mode where you can do a lot of what you did in the single player. You can also choose different aliens after you beat them in the single player mode. You have to be careful though; if you’re hit once, your human disguise loses its clothes, leaving the human in its undies, and if you’re hit again, you turn back into an alien and lose some coins. You then must scan another human and make it your disguise. Some levels also have threats, like fast cars, gunman, thieves, and alien-tracking robots.

The graphics in the game are very bright and colorful and everyone has a cartoonish look. The areas are small so you won’t get lost. However, even if the areas are small, large hazards like the cars, elephants, grim reapers, and etc make it easier for you to get hit by them. The music is, while not memorable, really wacky and crazy. It definitely has a rather unique art style, which kind of reminds me of Costume Quest, and Wind Waker since it has that unique cel-shaded look. The aliens also have unique designs that are different throughout each level. The humor, while out of my age limit, is rather cute and it is funny to see people fly around when you hit them with a boxing glove and when they all panic.

There are however, a lot of glaring problems with this game that wouldn’t pass if it were released today. The game is really and I mean REALLY short! You thought Kane and Lynch 2 and Vanquish were short, it took me two and a half hours to beat Under the Skin’s single player mode. That would not fly today. It just annoys me at how short this game was. This game also came from Capcom, so I feel a little betrayed they would do this. Two-and-a-half hours are more like a 4-dollar DLC game. I also don’t like how repetitious the single player mode is and how simple and weak the story is. It’s like no thought, besides the opening and ending, were put into the story. I just hate how games of today think they can make a 3 to 6 hour campaign and just focus on multiplayer. Stop doing this, game developers! JUST STOP DOING IT! I mean seriously, I might have grown up with the N64 and into the modern days of gaming, but there are still things in the modern day game industry that piss me off! Make a worthwhile story mode and focus on multiplayer only if you have made a good story and worthwhile single player, which this game fails on both accounts of story and multiplayer. There just isn’t enough substance to make this a full price tag buy. There is just nothing memorable about this game! This seems like a game you would give a video game school as an assignment to see how you could make it better or something.

This game is a mess, and there is nothing memorable or noteworthy about it. The levels and missions are repetitious, the story is half-baked, it’s way too short, and it just gets everything wrong besides a decent graphical presentation and just a really weird premise with cameos from the Resident Evil franchise. If you like this kind of weird crazy Japanese style game, then I could easily say yes, but for everyone else, just don’t go buy it. I mean if you were to buy it, just don’t pay 10 bucks for it. Now, it definitely isn’t black list worthy, but it almost falls in that area. The only reason I would recommend checking out this game is if you have some time to kill before the next big release or you just want to play a really bizarre game.

This game gets a 4 out of 10



Game Review: Gun.Smoke

Game Review: Gun.Smoke:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvzI8zdLQyM

A pretty cool NES game by Capcom, Hope you enjoy the review, Thanks for watching!

Collector Edition: Street Fighter 4

My review of the Single player portion of Bad Company 2 hit a slight problem so enjoy one of the first collectors edition episode. I promise to get that review done asap.

Let's Play - 1943: The Battle of Midway

Let's Play - 1943: The Battle of Midway:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96vG4Q6U6yc

This time its a Let's Play of a pretty cool game. I really like games like this, expect a review at a later time. I hope you enjoy this. Thanks for watching!