Anarchy Reigns
I don’t think SEGA cared much about Anarchy Reigns. Delaying it for months and releasing it at £20 show SEGA don’t think this will sell. After all despite critical acclaim, Platinum’s offering with SEGA haven’t been the biggest money makers. Madworld, Vanquish and even Bayonetta all suffered poor sales even though they range from Good to absolutely brilliant.
Anarchy Reigns marks the end of this partnership (it seems, SEGA will probably have some involvement in Bayonetta 2, they own the IP after all) and it seems to have gone off with a whimper rather than a bang.
AR is a 3D beat-em up designed with multiplayer in mind and it shows throughout. The Single Player campaign is short, a few hours for each side at best and it rarely picks up from a relatively dull start. Each of the games characters is thrown into the campaign but outside of the main 7 their involvement seems arbitrary. Take the crimson dragon sisters for example, they appear, fight you, then run off and never come up again. They have nothing to do with the main plot they are just there.
Each level has three main missions and three optional missions. Each of which is ranked based on performance. Missions are unlocked one at a time by getting points from completing missions. Getting Platinum medals will pretty much guarantee the next mission will unlock while a lesser rank will require you to replay the mission (or kill a lot of the infinitely respawning enemies).
Missions range from fights with the other characters and clearing waves of the weaker basic enemies, to completing five laps of a course in one of the game’s vehicles or escorting a weak NPC to safety.
Primarily though you’ll be fighting something. For this you have a two type of attack normal and Killer weapon attacks, with each having a light and a heavy attack. Killer weapon attacks are much more powerful but require one or two bars of a four bar meter. You fill up this meter by using standard attacks or getting hit. You can also grab opponents. Mixing light/heavy attacks and giving slight pauses between attacks, as well as jumping attacks also add to your arsenal.
So there’s a good selection of moves. Problem is that it’s the same for everyone. There is very little difference between the characters. Character choice will more than likely be cosmetic rather than strategic. Platinum could’ve done more to offer more individuality to the characters.
AR also suffers for a few little things that all add up to one big thing, like how you start missions. You can bring up a list of missions for that level by pressing back but you still have to move to the mission marker to start them. Once there you have to wait a second for a prompt to appear as pressing back before the prompt will open up the mission select screen. This gets annoying fast.
As does the lack of a restart function. Whenever I play any game that has ranked missions I like to be able to restart them from scratch when I fail, or can tell I’m not going to get a high rank. Annoyingly you have to fail or quit the mission, then go through the wait at the marker for the prompt thing I mentioned above to try again.
Also the main missions cannot be repeated until you finish the game. Getting Gold instead of Platinum and not being able to replay the mission straight away is another small annoyance.
It’s not all bad though, while it doesn’t look all that great it sound fantastic, with an excellent soundtrack. The multiplayer also have a good range of modes including a horde like survival mode, and a mode that behaves a bit like Grifball meets American Football meets Hockey. There’s also a good level of humour with the usual Platinum silliness we’ve come to expect.
AR feels like an idea they had that they saw through to the end that just didn’t feel right when it was finished. It’s still a fun game but it lacks the magic we’ve come to expect from a Platinum game. Unique but only really competent and solid, rather than ground breaking and amazing, AR is a bit disappointing but only by Platinum’s own ridiculously high standards.
7/10
Anarchy Reigns marks the end of this partnership (it seems, SEGA will probably have some involvement in Bayonetta 2, they own the IP after all) and it seems to have gone off with a whimper rather than a bang.
AR is a 3D beat-em up designed with multiplayer in mind and it shows throughout. The Single Player campaign is short, a few hours for each side at best and it rarely picks up from a relatively dull start. Each of the games characters is thrown into the campaign but outside of the main 7 their involvement seems arbitrary. Take the crimson dragon sisters for example, they appear, fight you, then run off and never come up again. They have nothing to do with the main plot they are just there.
Each level has three main missions and three optional missions. Each of which is ranked based on performance. Missions are unlocked one at a time by getting points from completing missions. Getting Platinum medals will pretty much guarantee the next mission will unlock while a lesser rank will require you to replay the mission (or kill a lot of the infinitely respawning enemies).
Missions range from fights with the other characters and clearing waves of the weaker basic enemies, to completing five laps of a course in one of the game’s vehicles or escorting a weak NPC to safety.
Primarily though you’ll be fighting something. For this you have a two type of attack normal and Killer weapon attacks, with each having a light and a heavy attack. Killer weapon attacks are much more powerful but require one or two bars of a four bar meter. You fill up this meter by using standard attacks or getting hit. You can also grab opponents. Mixing light/heavy attacks and giving slight pauses between attacks, as well as jumping attacks also add to your arsenal.
So there’s a good selection of moves. Problem is that it’s the same for everyone. There is very little difference between the characters. Character choice will more than likely be cosmetic rather than strategic. Platinum could’ve done more to offer more individuality to the characters.
AR also suffers for a few little things that all add up to one big thing, like how you start missions. You can bring up a list of missions for that level by pressing back but you still have to move to the mission marker to start them. Once there you have to wait a second for a prompt to appear as pressing back before the prompt will open up the mission select screen. This gets annoying fast.
As does the lack of a restart function. Whenever I play any game that has ranked missions I like to be able to restart them from scratch when I fail, or can tell I’m not going to get a high rank. Annoyingly you have to fail or quit the mission, then go through the wait at the marker for the prompt thing I mentioned above to try again.
Also the main missions cannot be repeated until you finish the game. Getting Gold instead of Platinum and not being able to replay the mission straight away is another small annoyance.
It’s not all bad though, while it doesn’t look all that great it sound fantastic, with an excellent soundtrack. The multiplayer also have a good range of modes including a horde like survival mode, and a mode that behaves a bit like Grifball meets American Football meets Hockey. There’s also a good level of humour with the usual Platinum silliness we’ve come to expect.
AR feels like an idea they had that they saw through to the end that just didn’t feel right when it was finished. It’s still a fun game but it lacks the magic we’ve come to expect from a Platinum game. Unique but only really competent and solid, rather than ground breaking and amazing, AR is a bit disappointing but only by Platinum’s own ridiculously high standards.
7/10
posted by Master hunter at 1:54 pm
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