Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance
With a subtitle like "Fists of Vengeance," hopefully you know what you're getting yourself into.
Published: August 31, 2005
Hey Cavia, since no one else seems to tell you, we'll offer some free advice: your games thus far have been terribly repetitive and needlessly difficult at times. Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex and especially Drakengard weren't shining examples of depth or balance.
Beat Down continues this tradition with a beat-em-up that does little more than let you beat people up. It's not that I'm looking for a ton of depth in my brawler, but the game does hint at what could have been quite a bit more in the way of exploration or storyline and instead falls back on vapid clichés and hilariously bad dialogue.
The bulk of the story is in the setup, and at first it seems like things could be rather interesting. Five of the Zanetti family's best assassins are sent in to put the kibosh on a drug deal for a rival drug cartel. When they arrive, however, the cartel is already dead, and members of the Zanetti family are lying in wait.
From there the game splits, and you choose your favorite character out of the five, each with their own specialties and styles of fighting. The storyline then follows that character's path toward finding the truth of what happened.
Or at least that was the idea. The execution, however, is far more basic. After the set-up and escape, you're treated to a "full" city that allows you to walk up to any person walking the streets and beat the crap out of them. If they're of the slightly tougher variety, you can try to negotiate with them, opening up the option to recuit, rob, interrogate or just beat the crap out of them.
The last option is perhaps the most disturbing - especially after you've already humiliated a guy (or worse, a girl) by smacking the crap out of them a bit. It's a completely unnecessary step (and leads to some of the game's worst repetitive sections), and honestly feels added on just for the sake of shock value. Of course, the most annoying bit comes after a fight, where you'll hear literally the same line at the conclusion, and that's AFTER you get one of a whopping two verbal responses to the fight based on whether or not you got hit.
Since nearly anyone in the game can potentially become your ally with enough persuasion, there is the ability to build your own small army. You can take a few characters with you into some missions, but their AI isn't strong enough to stay alive for very long. They'll use any items they have, but much like you, when a bunch of characters gang up, the game can become brutally tough.
Since the game switches between simple all-out brawls and more one-on-one matches, there is quite a bit of fighting to be had, but all the work that went into the combat system is largely unused when a simple button mashing routine will often get the job done much better. Winning one-on-one matches will net you a bit of experience, but for the most part, there's no real way to level up, so the RPG elements never really gel enough to make you feel like you're leveling up enough to see any advances that the game doesn't deem necessary.
Then there's the fact that the game's just too damned repetitious. So much of what you do, you'll end up doing over and over and over again ad tedium, from the normal brawls to seeing out fights in an attempt to level up to getting new clothes and going under the knife to avoid fighting during critical moments where you have to make it to a point with as few confrontations as possible to buying supplies to refill energy. The game just doesn't feel entertaining past about the two hour mark.
If it were just that the game was a shallow beat-em-up, I'd almost understand. After all, the amount of depth in a game like Double Dragon or even Streets of Rage is nothing major, but the underlying gameplay is just simple enough to be fun without putting on airs that it's something more complex.
Visually, the game passes, but there are plenty of parts of the game that have small textures stretched way to thin. The engine handles conveying a basic, gritty feel to things, but there's a lot of odd shimmering and a general lack of overall smoothness to the stuff on screen. The different parts of the city are varied, but there aren't a lot of them, but loading times between zones become far to pervasive. The camera works fairly well in open areas, but in tight quarters, it's a joke, and literally makes some sections of the game almost unplayable.
Aurally, things are far less fair. One of the characters sports an Irish accent that comes and goes, everyone reuses dialogue like they're Rainman, and the selection of "music" is painfully bad. Some sections of the game have nothing but a few looping grungy tracks with a bland quasi-industrial drum beat.
I don't have a problem with the game being a very basic beat-em-up, but all the hype about a free-roaming city and the claims of a complex battle system erode pretty quickly under the weight of a repetitive set of enemies and situations that never really feel all that great to begin with. There are certainly worse-playing beat-em-ups out there, but none that pretend they're more complex than they really are.
This is probably a decent rental, and something to play with friends, but there's little reason to pick up a full copy.
Beat Down continues this tradition with a beat-em-up that does little more than let you beat people up. It's not that I'm looking for a ton of depth in my brawler, but the game does hint at what could have been quite a bit more in the way of exploration or storyline and instead falls back on vapid clichés and hilariously bad dialogue.
The bulk of the story is in the setup, and at first it seems like things could be rather interesting. Five of the Zanetti family's best assassins are sent in to put the kibosh on a drug deal for a rival drug cartel. When they arrive, however, the cartel is already dead, and members of the Zanetti family are lying in wait.
From there the game splits, and you choose your favorite character out of the five, each with their own specialties and styles of fighting. The storyline then follows that character's path toward finding the truth of what happened.
Or at least that was the idea. The execution, however, is far more basic. After the set-up and escape, you're treated to a "full" city that allows you to walk up to any person walking the streets and beat the crap out of them. If they're of the slightly tougher variety, you can try to negotiate with them, opening up the option to recuit, rob, interrogate or just beat the crap out of them.
The last option is perhaps the most disturbing - especially after you've already humiliated a guy (or worse, a girl) by smacking the crap out of them a bit. It's a completely unnecessary step (and leads to some of the game's worst repetitive sections), and honestly feels added on just for the sake of shock value. Of course, the most annoying bit comes after a fight, where you'll hear literally the same line at the conclusion, and that's AFTER you get one of a whopping two verbal responses to the fight based on whether or not you got hit.
Since nearly anyone in the game can potentially become your ally with enough persuasion, there is the ability to build your own small army. You can take a few characters with you into some missions, but their AI isn't strong enough to stay alive for very long. They'll use any items they have, but much like you, when a bunch of characters gang up, the game can become brutally tough.
Since the game switches between simple all-out brawls and more one-on-one matches, there is quite a bit of fighting to be had, but all the work that went into the combat system is largely unused when a simple button mashing routine will often get the job done much better. Winning one-on-one matches will net you a bit of experience, but for the most part, there's no real way to level up, so the RPG elements never really gel enough to make you feel like you're leveling up enough to see any advances that the game doesn't deem necessary.
Then there's the fact that the game's just too damned repetitious. So much of what you do, you'll end up doing over and over and over again ad tedium, from the normal brawls to seeing out fights in an attempt to level up to getting new clothes and going under the knife to avoid fighting during critical moments where you have to make it to a point with as few confrontations as possible to buying supplies to refill energy. The game just doesn't feel entertaining past about the two hour mark.
If it were just that the game was a shallow beat-em-up, I'd almost understand. After all, the amount of depth in a game like Double Dragon or even Streets of Rage is nothing major, but the underlying gameplay is just simple enough to be fun without putting on airs that it's something more complex.
Visually, the game passes, but there are plenty of parts of the game that have small textures stretched way to thin. The engine handles conveying a basic, gritty feel to things, but there's a lot of odd shimmering and a general lack of overall smoothness to the stuff on screen. The different parts of the city are varied, but there aren't a lot of them, but loading times between zones become far to pervasive. The camera works fairly well in open areas, but in tight quarters, it's a joke, and literally makes some sections of the game almost unplayable.
Aurally, things are far less fair. One of the characters sports an Irish accent that comes and goes, everyone reuses dialogue like they're Rainman, and the selection of "music" is painfully bad. Some sections of the game have nothing but a few looping grungy tracks with a bland quasi-industrial drum beat.
I don't have a problem with the game being a very basic beat-em-up, but all the hype about a free-roaming city and the claims of a complex battle system erode pretty quickly under the weight of a repetitive set of enemies and situations that never really feel all that great to begin with. There are certainly worse-playing beat-em-ups out there, but none that pretend they're more complex than they really are.
This is probably a decent rental, and something to play with friends, but there's little reason to pick up a full copy.
