Category: 
Control of your character is rough. The game does go out of its way to reflect a real life type of fighting physics. But it is a bit too tough. Brad’s response time is way too slow, and awkward. Realism is one thing - and fun is another. Brad is a big brawler type not a Kung fu fighter. He is meant to be about the speed and weight of a heavy weight boxer. As the game goes forward, you get more moves for him. Though his character is very poor at kick boxing. It is difficult to time strikes and combos. For instance when you punch an opponent a few times and he goes down, you want to do some finishing moves like jumping on him and punching his head, or doing a low sweep kick. Usually by the time Brad does it, the opponent is all ready up. there is nothing worse than having moves go either above the enemies head, or having him jump up and hit Brad while he is open instead.
The game also has a dubious feature where if Brad has been hit enough - he will see stars and start to stagger around. the square button is supposed to release him from the stagger mode, and deflect oncoming blows, but it doesn’t. The AI in this game is brutal. Even if you have a blistering set of combo moves and have the enemy’s health bar down to an imperceptibly thin line, the NPC can still beat you. The AI controlled characters who should be dead by that time some how mange to cling right onto your character. Even if your health bar is full, and the NPC is almost dead, the NPC can still fight like a berserker, and does in a weird unfairly balanced fashion. these are supposed to be street thugs that you are fighting against, not zombies. No matter how hard you beat them down, they didn’t get any weaker and rarely see stars and become dazed.
When you beat the heck out of the opponents enough and they are about to go down you get treated to a slow - mo final move. The baddies that are dead leave behind a sports drink bottle or a juice box to refill the health bar. But you seldom get to make use of them. The game’s tutorial modes are invisible and continues on way past where it should. this should be separate. The game has a training mode, and that is where the tutorial should be. You are required to kill off the enemies in a certain way and you are given a set of keypad inputs to use. If you kill them the wrong way - you fail the mission. That is annoyingly repetitive. Dead is dead, or it should be in a fighter game.
Targeting doesn’t work very well. R1 is supposed to lock on the target and it doesn’t work all that well. And without sprouting extra fingers I don’t know how one is expected to execute combos and targeting at the same time. Good thing I abandoned playing games with my thumbs long ago. You need at least seven fingers on one hand to play this game. Is that a problem for you?
In time as you beat the various gang leaders you can play with them as a partner. It would be fine if you could switch and play as various characters, but you can’t. Instead you have to protect their butt as well. The partners aren’t much help and end up being a liability. There is one female character in the game. She is the narrators character. It is kind of cool that the head of the gang that Brad works for is a woman. She is a young Asian woman named Shun Ying Lee and she is the boss of a local band of thugs in Chinatown. But it is too bad that her character isn’t a better fighter.
There is plenty to do since there are 100 missions in its story mode. You can pick from 2 or 3 missions at any given time, but you do have to complete them. It isn’t a sandbox, it’s mission based. You have to unlock the Challenge mode for an extra half dozen environments to fight in. The levels really should have been included in the game’s main mode, instead of using bogus explanations in the story for reusing the same rooms over and over.
I began to wonder if it was just us that were having so many problems with this game. I swapped out my number one controller pad for a newer one to make sure that something wasn’t wrong with it. I noticed that other members of the press were recommending that you throw the controller across the room several times to preserve your sanity while playing this game. A whole ton of weapons are eventually made available like pipes, bottles, axes and swords. But Brad can’t seem to keep a grip on them. He gets one or possibly two whacks in and then drops it. The NPC’s pick them up and deal all sorts of damage.
The game could have had a fun factor going for it that comes from the pure rush of adrenaline customary with a Namco fighting game. Urban Reign is badly flawed and is only playable on its easiest levels, according to a consensus among game reviewers. (Thankfully, not just us.) The basic game-play and the mission oriented modes are entertaining enough that a sequel might just be able to clean up the mess and save the franchise. This game is a fine rental, and would be fine to have for a few days or a snowy weekend like we just had.
We give it a 5 out of 10
Girls Point of View : Poor
Will Girls Want to Play it? : Eh, maybe a rental.
Purse : $39.99 US
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