Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Keith Schleicher

Other than a couple of standout titles like Wipeout Pure and Lumines, the launch titles for the PSP were rather lackluster. One of those titles was Rengoku. The action game with a few RPG elements featured randomly generated levels, but the lack of an engaging story and repetitive combat caused the game to be panned by reviewers. Apparently Konami felt that there was enough promise to produce a sequel. Can Rengoku II: The Stairway to H.E.A.V.E.N. (R2) make up for the sins of the past?

In R2 you play as an A.D.A.M. unit, or Autonomous Dueling Armed Machine. A.D.A.M. was programmed to be a weapon. A.D.A.M. features Elixir Skin, a regenerating coating that allows it to mount new weapons to its body. Eventually the A.D.A.M. quickly finished any wars in the world and became obsolete because of that. The A.D.A.M. units were placed into Rengoku Towers to fight against each other.

Your character has several options to change his look. You have several color choices to use for your character. You can also see the lines like veins running through the body of your character and the other A.D.A.M. units. It’s almost as if the characters are influenced a bit by Tron. They also move realistically, but the animations feel canned and lack variety. Even when different weapons are mounted, the attacks look similar.

The enemies you face are A.D.A.M. units just like yourself. Because of the amount of weapons available and the ability to change configurations, you would think that you would see a large variety of enemies. Unfortunately all of them have a strange sameness to them. Some of them have different colors and different weapons, but you really don’t feel like your enemies are any more unique than another, except when facing bosses.

People complained about how similar the levels looked in Doom 3. The levels are usually rooms connected by hallways. While the levels feature different colors, you can’t tell much difference between the rooms of each level. Luckily you have a map in the game or else you’d get lost consistently.

The music in R2 is hard driving techno tracks. The beat never lets up and almost become hypnotic. If you don’t mind that style of music, then you won’t have any issues with the constant pulsating. If you don’t like it, it will get old very quickly.

Most of the sound effects come from combat. Most melee attacks lack the punch, no pun intended, of the attack. You hear the attacks land against the enemy, but there isn’t any kind of reaction from the enemy. Ranged weapons sound like high-powered pea shooters. High-pitched squeaks come from these weapons and are less than impressive.

Control is typical of third-person action games. Moving is handled with the D-pad and the analog nub. Strafing is done by adding the R button to your movement. Hitting L locks on to an enemy. Attacks are mapped to the face buttons using different body parts. Circle uses the right arm weapon, Square the left arm weapon, Triangle the head weapon, and X the chest weapon.

The controls suffer from the lack of a right analog nub. It’s more intuitive to control movement with two analog sticks than moving with the analog nub and adding the R button to strafe around an enemy while not locked on to an enemy. Locking onto an enemy helps to fight during battles, but the controls aren’t always precise enough. Also, the response of the buttons could be quicker. While some of the weapons are quicker than others, it still feels like the buttons aren’t as responsive as they should be. Dodging is done by tapping in the same direction twice quickly. Sometimes it seems to dodge when you don’t want to, and doesn’t dodge when you want to. The odd controls really hold the game back.

The gameplay consists of entering a room, fighting a couple of enemies, and then moving on to the next room. You can mount different weapons to your head, arms, and chest. Your legs are able to mount special weapons and defensive mechanisms. While this all sounds interesting, there are several flaws with the system.

You get weapons by fighting against enemies in the rooms that you explore in the tower and by destroying environmental objects. You can perform “overkill” attacks. It’s the equivalent of kicking a man while he’s down. Once an enemy is dead you keep on performing combos. This increases the likelihood that better weapons will be dropped. Usually the enemies you fight will have more advanced weaponry than you have. At first this isn’t too much of an issue because your initial enemies are rather weak, but eventually it gets very difficult to destroy enemies because of the difference in power between your weapons and the weapons of your enemies.

This wouldn’t be so bad if not for the fact that the weapons you equip have a limited number of uses. While this can be understandable for a long-range projectile weapon, if you swing with a melee weapon but don’t strike anything that counts as a “use” of that weapon. I can’t remember the last time that a weapon degraded from hitting dead air. Projectile weapons can overheat from overuse, rendering them temporarily inoperable. Also, if the weapon runs out of uses, they disappear. Eventually you can upgrade your slots so that you can have an extra weapon in reserve that will appear after your first weapon runs out of uses, but it will be a while before you can actually access this. This leaves you with a hand-to-hand attack, which is practically useless later in the game.

As you fight, enemies also drop Elixir Skin. The Elixir Skin is used to upgrade your body. You can increase your stamina, increase the number of slots for each body part, or improve your defenses. You can only upgrade your body at terminals, and you need a large amount of Elixir Skin to make upgrades. Each subsequent upgrade for a specific upgrade costs exponentially more than the previous upgrade. You can only equip weapons to your body at terminals as well.

The game is apparently a futuristic take on Dante’s Divine Comedy. While you can tell this by some of the names of the characters and the acronyms used, the story is mostly absent from the game. You’ll occasionally get a few lines of dialogue after a boss battle, but other than that the story doesn’t pull you in like it should.

The repetitive combat, the boring levels, and generic characters make the game substandard. Many of the complaints with the game play from the first game haven’t been addressed. With so many flaws in the game, it’s hard to understand why it was made.

While R2 should have a large amount of replay value because of the amount of weapons available. The game boasts over 300 unique items to mount on your character. However, because of the battle system and the unbalanced combat, you won’t want to take this trip through hell more than once.

The game does support four-player multiplayer. One feature that is nice about this is that you can play four players with one UMD wirelessly. However, you can only do this using the local connections. Forget about playing with others online over the Internet. Also, the multiplayer is fairly standard of other games. However, you don’t know what a particular weapon does until you actually equip it. You also can’t equip a new weapon until an equiped weapon on you is used up.

Rengoku II is incredibly repetitive. If the fighting was fun, this wouldn’t be an issue. If the game had an understandable story, it might be worth trying to progress through to the end. Instead, you’ll grow tired of Rengoku II rather quickly. If you were hoping for an improvement over the original, then you’ll be rather disappointed.

Gaming Trend Score

54

1. Graphics: 65
2. Audio: 56
3. Controls: 60
4. Gameplay: 45
5. Value/Replay: 55
6. OVERALL:54