Posts tagged ‘PS2 Games’
PS2 – Warriors Orochi 2 Review
Since the release of Dynasty Warriors 2 in 2000, Koei has churned out a remarkable number of games in its Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors series of hack-and-slash action games. Yet over the years, for all these sequels, the gameplay has hardly evolved at all. A year ago, Warriors Orochi brought these two series together, but aside from its unusual crossover concept, it did nothing to differentiate itself from its predecessors. Now, Warriors Orochi 2 is here, and it continues the trend of delivering all the excruciatingly repetitive gameplay, as well as lack of innovation, for which the series has become known.
In Warriors Orochi, the titular serpent king decides to merge third-century China with 16th-century Japan, conveniently uniting characters from the Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors games. The brave heroes ultimately put aside their cultural and temporal differences to thwart Orochi’s plans to conquer this strange new world. But it’s not long before violence and unrest again befall the land. There are a total of five stories to select from in Orochi 2’s Story mode: one for each of the three kingdoms of China, one for the Samurai Warriors of Japan, and one about Orochi along with his followers, which serves as a prequel to the first game. Each story is equally awful. The use of static character portraits is lame while the dialogue is clumsy and full of awkward anachronisms like “Breaking news!” The voice acting is also appalling. The narrator sounds like he’s reading the news on NPR, and the broad characterizations of the warriors, who sound like pompous aristocrats, dumb oafs, or valley girls, don’t endear the characters to you one bit. On the contrary, just spending time in their company is unpleasant.
The action takes place on large battlefields. You choose three characters to take into battle, and you can switch among them at any time. The concept of fighting in the midst of a raging battle as armies clash around you sounds ripe with potential, but Warriors Orochi 2 utterly fails to deliver on it. Rather than viciously attacking each other, enemy soldiers seem to be trained to run up to you and wait calmly for you to kill them, giving you the occasional gentle poke with their spears or swords to nudge you on. In addition to being identically stupid, all the soldiers in any given unit look the same, which may have been forgivable at one time, but now makes the series look as dated as it feels.
As you hack your way through your enemies, there’s no sense of impact or resistance. Your weapon seems to just go right through them. You’ll lay waste to several-hundred enemy soldiers in a typical battle, just by pressing the attack button over and over again. This is about as dull as hack-and-slack action gets. To be fair, you have a modest variety of attacks you can employ, and there are three basic types of heroes, each with his own unique abilities. There’s also a new type of attack–the triple attack–in which all three members of your team attack the enemy at once. But in practice, this variety doesn’t matter much. The enemy soldiers go down very easily, regardless of how you choose to dispatch them, and using the occasional special attack doesn’t make it any more interesting.
A bigger threat than the enemy is the ineptitude of your own allies. Each scenario has conditions for victory and for defeat. Victory generally comes when you kill certain enemy captains, while defeat is typically the result of losing a captain on your side. Throughout each battle, you’ll constantly be updated on events taking place all over the battlefield, and if you see that a crucial captain of yours is being attacked, you’ll want to rush to his aid immediately because captains can’t hold their own against the enemy for very long. Having to babysit your allies only makes the action that much more tiresome.
You earn experience during each battle, which makes your characters stronger. In between battles you can fuse your acquired weapons together into more powerful ones, as well as equip your characters with a range of special abilities, such as stronger defense or a gradually refilling life gauge. But all this growth and development is hard to get invested in when the action it serves is so tedious. At least leveling up means you can cut through your foes faster, and anything that makes the game go by faster is a good thing.
In addition to the game’s Story mode, there’s a Free mode, in which you can play any unlocked scenario with any character. There’s also a Dream mode, which features a number of scenarios that fall outside of the main storylines. Those with a deep knowledge of the history and lore of the characters may get a kick out of seeing Yoshimoto Imagawa, Xing Cai, and Ginchiyo Tachibana fight alongside each other, but for most of us, there’s nothing that sets these levels apart from those you encounter during the Story mode.
Playing the game cooperatively with a friend makes it a bit more bearable only because then you have someone to commiserate with about how boring it is, though the split-screen makes the already cruddy graphics even less impressive. There are also a few competitive modes available, including Tag Team and Elimination modes. These play out like a typical fighting game, and because your human opponent is invariably more intelligent than what the game throws at you, they’re some of the more interesting offerings here. But they don’t come close to offering the depth and intensity of most dedicated fighting games, so even this won’t hold your interest for long. There’s also a game mode called Tower, in which the object is to knock more brain-dead enemies off of a tower rooftop than your opponent, and one called Steeplechase. This last mode, a race on horseback, has items you can pick up and use much like in a typical cart racer. However, you’re limited to just one uninspired track, and the horses control so loosely that just getting them to go where you want is a challenge. There’s no online support for these or any of the game’s modes, but considering how poor they all are, that’s really no big loss.
The graphics are very disappointing. Aside from being considerably sharper than the PS2 version, the 360 version doesn’t look significantly better. In both versions, the environments are bland and lacking in detail. The visual glitches, such as fences popping into and out of existence, are also commonplace. The sound is even more dreadful than the visuals. The voice acting is heinous, the sounds of battle are lifeless, the music is forgettable, and you’ll hear characters constantly repeat the same few obnoxious phrases.
At least the first Warriors Orochi game had the novelty of the crossover concept, which was a clever bit of fan service. By now, that novelty has worn off. With each subsequent iteration of the Warriors series, the gameplay feels increasingly tired. Warriors Orochi 2 has a whopping 92 playable characters, which is 13 more warriors than in the last game, but just tossing more characters into the mix does nothing to correct the fundamental problems with the series.
PS2 – Mercenaries 2: World in Flames Review
Imagine a game with a huge, open world filled with dozens of unique vehicles and attacks that lets you wreak destruction whenever and wherever you choose. Now, toss in game-crippling bugs, brain-dead AI, unsatisfying gunplay, a lousy story, and repetitive missions. That’s Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. Mindlessly causing chaos can be enjoyable in short bursts, but beyond those all-too-infrequent bits of fun, Mercenaries 2 is a dud.
You play as one of three mercenaries–all of whom have very similar storylines. The game follows your absurd quest for vengeance on a man who hired you to do a job but didn’t pay. Mercs 2’s story is bad (as is the voice acting), but it’s ultimately inconsequential and all of the cutscenes can safely be skipped. The first few missions are designed to get you accustomed to the game’s third-person-shooting action and extremely touchy vehicle controls. In the span of 30 minutes, you’ll shoot several different weapons, toss grenades, and use C-4. You’ll also drive cars and a tank as you secure what will eventually become your home base. After that, the first few contracts you take on are fun, but that’s mostly because the gameplay mechanics are new and the thrill of destruction is still fresh.
It’s after the first hour or so that you’ll start to notice something’s amiss. For a game that’s all about guns, actually firing one isn’t terribly satisfying. Weapons feel weak, it’s difficult to hit moving targets, and the damage the weapons cause is inconsistent. In fact, it’s easier to hijack a tank or grapple onto a flying helicopter than it is to destroy one. Heavier weapons, such as rocket-propelled grenades, are great and can destroy almost anything they hit, but the amount of ammunition is so limited that you won’t be able to use them often. Plus, it’s tedious to have to go in a shop, purchase a weapon, go outside, call for the weapon, and then wait to pick it up. Why can’t you just walk into a store and buy a gun?
The game’s version of Venezuela is enormous, but its size is mostly a detriment. There’s not a whole lot to do, so you’ll be tempted to make your own fun by blowing up buildings and cars, as well as terrorizing towns in a tank. While this might be enticing (and fun for a short time), it’s a bad idea if you’re trying to actually make it to the end of the game. Not only are you penalized for harming civilians, but one stray bullet can anger an entire faction. Factions are your main source of income and can be essential to mission progress, but when a faction is angry with you, it will quit offering you work, as well as shoot you on sight. The large world also means that it takes forever to get from one place to the next. Roads wind aimlessly around the terrain; the map is blurry and hard to see; there’s no GPS; random friendly soldiers will blow up your cars; and helicopters are frequently shot out of the sky by missiles that rarely miss. To make matters worse, when you’re killed after hitting a checkpoint, you typically have to go back to your home base or the outpost where you got the mission and then travel all the way back to your target, even when you select the retry option.
Mercenaries 2 purports to give you all sorts of freedom when it comes to how you exact your revenge, but in reality, your choices are few. Yes, there are different factions and groups spread out across the map, but typically, only one of them has a contract that will help advance the storyline. Most of the contracts are limited to annoying escort missions, fetch quests, or a combination of the two. You can also earn cash by capturing or killing and then photographing high-value targets. This is interesting the first few times, but the money you make for bagging someone isn’t worth the hassle. Factions get mad when you take out their people, and friendly soldiers will often kill the guy you’re trying to extract alive.
The game can be mildly amusing for a short time, but the fun quickly grinds to a halt as the game’s bevy of bugs and problems make themselves apparent. Enemy AI is horrific. If you’re injured, you can just run behind a building and hide–soldiers won’t make much of an effort to find you. They won’t even go to great lengths to shoot you if you’re right next to them, often standing there oblivious while you pepper them with bullets. When you have to destroy a object, sometimes the easiest thing to do is get inside of it and let the bad guys blow up the very thing they’re supposed to be protecting. The problems just keep on coming. Rescue helicopters can land on your head and crash (if they show up at all); vehicles can get stuck on tree trunks; people you’re supposed to escort can’t keep up with you; hitting a stop sign or many other seemingly innocuous objects will stop a vehicle in its tracks, which is a big problem if you’re trying to make a quick escape. Combat falls flat because shooting guys takes longer and is more difficult than simply running up to them and punching them. Enemy soldiers can shoot through walls and often appear out of thin air, too. Civilians will run right in front of you when you drive, costing you money each time you hit them. You might even be unlucky enough to have the game crash during a load screen or even lose progress due to a save game failing. The list of bugs and problems really is staggering.
Mercenaries 2’s visuals are terrible. The draw distance is so pitiful that steering boats is difficult because islands will pop up in your path so fast that you’ll run aground. The game’s bread and butter–its explosions–are generally disappointing. There aren’t many different buildings to destroy, either, so you end up seeing the same explosions again and again. You won’t see the buildings fall, though. A cloud of smoke hides the structure, and when the smoke clears, the building is gone. Clipping, low-quality cutscenes, repetitive buildings, enemies that all look alike (right down to the same terrible animation when they get shot), a horrific camera, a drab color palette, and no widescreen or progressive scan support round out the package.
Mercenaries 2 is filled with bugs and glitches that are unacceptable in a retail release. Even if it were possible to overlook the broken elements, you’re still left with abysmal AI, repetitive mission structure, awful graphics, touchy controls, and a huge world without much to do. Mindless, random destruction provides some thrills, but there are so many better open-world action games out there that there’s no reason to spend your time and money on this clearly unfinished game.
The Games Reviews 