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Bloody Roar 4 Review
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Developer |
Hudson
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| Publisher |
Hudson
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| Genre |
Fighting
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If you’re a fan of the console fighter, these days, you must be one pleased gamer. With the sheer amount of brawlers released for the system so far this year, is it any wonder that some of them end up being standard setters for the genre? Hudson takes on the task of adding another contender to the fighting genre with it’s latest release, Bloody Roar 4.
You may remember the early incarnations of this game from your PS1 days, which introduced us to the idea of fighting with characters that could turn into various beasts. In a survival of the fittest story arc, the fighting takes place in various locations around the world, pitting man and beast in a bloody confrontation of primal instincts. While the first Bloody Roar did fairly well, the latest version fails to live up to the standard set by the Virtua Fighter or DOA series. When all is said and done, the game has promise, but manages to fall short.
Gameplay - The strategy elements in BR4 manage to have include some innovative ideas, however, it is the execution of these ideas that leaves some room for improvement.
The basic idea has you starting as your human self, with two power bars. One is your life meter, found in every fighter on the planet. The second is your Beast Gauge which, when filled, allows you to turn into your animal form. As you take hits as a human, your Beast Gauge fills up. When filled, hitting the circle button will take you to your Beast Form and allow you a variety of more powerful attacks. While in Beast Form, hits taken slowly depletes your Beast Gauge until you return to Human Form which makes your Life Gauge vulnerable to attack.
The premise has some great potential. Do you turn to your beast form right away and go for the quick kill? Or do you conserve your energy and wait for the right moment to attack? In addition to this, with a full Beast Gauge, you can perform various special moves and combos and unleash them on your opponent. Some of these will deplete your Beast Gauge and return you to your human self. These aspects hope to give some elements of strategy to the battles.
However, you will find that the sheer cheapness of this game will force you get into Beast Form right away, just to survive. The computer will unleash on you such a steady stream of attacks and combos as to render you powerless unless you adopt your beast alter ego. You can’t afford to stay and deplete your opponent in human form unless you have some supreme evasive skills. And the brings us to one of the major faults of BR4: broken gameplay.
Virtua Fighter, DOA and Soul Caliber have set the standard with their wide variety of blocks, reversals and counters. These aspects give a sense of balance to the game and allow relatively light weight characters to spar against heavier, more powerful opponents. BR4 allows you to block, but also has an inordinate amount of unblockable moves. Rest assured, your computer opponent will know all of them and feel no shame in using them. In addition, the only counter move you can perform is not only cumbersome to perform, but has to be done using precision timing and lightning quick reflexes. If it were the kind of game that allowed you to sit back and react to your opponents intelligent attack, this might be possible. But you won’t be that lucky as your opponent will be slamming your ass in an over-caffeinated fury like you were a Beast Chew Toy. Good luck with that timing thing.
Upsetting the balance even more is a combo system that is far too easy to implement and can be used far too offend. Tied to your Beast Gauge, all one has to do is smack your opponent down a few times and then unleash the combo. Far too powerful a move for it to be used that often and that easily. Air juggles are also too easy to perform and far to hard to break out of. Sure, a system does exist, but the results it gives you are far too minimal to be worth the small amount of energy it will save you. The eight-way run idea is present, but why bother to use it when the area you have to fight in is too small to avoid your opponent? You will be better off to run straight at them and get on with the button mashing.
All in all it is this broken, unbalanced gameplay that will have you not fighting, but mashing buttons like crazy just to stay in it. Even after you learn your characters set of moves, there will be no need to use them as your opponent will be unleashing a horde of cheap combos that give you no room to plan a cool series of attacks. No, just slam on the buttons until your Beast Gauge fills and then finish them with a combo. Rinse, repeat. There is your success strategy for BR4. So much potential falls to the lack of balance.
Other incentives to play are few and far between. Some added items that do nothing of real value to your character fall short of Soul Caliber's mighty weapon collection modes. Customization doesn’t really matter when you don’t care about your characters all that much to begin with. All in all, there isn’t much here to make me desire to keep playing it over and over.
Graphics - Graphically, there is little to complain about in this game. The character models look fine and many of the beast forms look very good. Some of the characters are cooler than others, so I found myself sticking to the ones I like the best. The Tiger, Wolf and Raven were some of the better characters, while the Bunny Rabbit and Beetle characters were laughable at best. Some great backgrounds make for interesting backdrops, however, you can’t explore them very much as you are confined to an invisible ring that locks you into a small square in the middle of the board. There is some cool animation to them and they provide a good sense of mood, but none of them gave me the thrill that the DOA backdrops did.
If there is one thing I have fault with, it’s in the special effects department. The usual explosions and lightning are all present in the game but look as though it was done using the latest edition of Photoshop. I found them to have a tacked on look that did nothing to create excitement or give your moves a sense of power.
All in all the graphics function well, but nothing gave me the hype that I needed or made my jaw drop with wonder at the level of detail or style.
Sound - What’s to say here? The music is your typical fighting genre rock soundtrack that neither makes my excited or annoyed. It adds the right amount of punch, should you need it, but manages to stay out of your way enough should you hate it. Character voices were okay, but again, nothing to really impress. The sound effects did the job well and were on par with most fighting games.
Bottom Line -
I hate to slam a game that tries to add some new life into the franchise, but BR4 is simply BROKEN. Nothing here manages to come together the way that it should and this leads to frustration and boredom. Players will be forced to resort to same old, same old moves in order ot win and no real sense of strategy is available. While the idea of turning into a beast is cool, the plain fact is that Bloody Roar 4 is a button masher and one of the worst of that lot in the genre.
With games like Virtua Fighter 4, Soul Caliber 2, Dead or Alive and Marvel vs. Capcom out there, it’s hard to recommend anyone getting this game. If you’re bored with those others, then grab this one as a rental. But be prepared for some major disappointment.
Review by Aaron Hilden
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