At Gamesfirst! we get excited about
video games. Its our job and we love it. But sometimes hype can be a bad thing. All
too often companies promise what they cant deliver, fans are left with light wallets
and heavy hearts, and we all just have to wait for the next quiet gem. Well, I am here to
help. Hopefully, I am writing in time to save you from the next high-profile dud: The
Bouncer.The
Bouncer tells the story of three very tough, very bored, and very strangely attired young
men who work as bouncers in a neighborhood bar. Their names are Sion, Kou, and Volt, and
they spend most of their time with their feet propped up, staring at the dartboard. That
is, until Dominique, one of Sions female admirers, is captured by a band of inhuman
freaks in red sunglasses and leather mummy-wrap, and taken into the lair of the Mikado,
where nothing and no one are what they seem.
And what a
story it is! True, the concept is not exactly unique, and the narrative can pretty much be
summed up with "hey, they look like bad guys, lets beat them up!" However,
the plot twists and the sheer abandon with which the story is told are truly inspired.
Were talking: secret agents; twitching, psychotic assassins; giant robots; morphing
wizards; and characters that become unwilling conduits for killer space satellites.
Then there
is the how the story is told. Squaresoft has created a look and sound that simply
has never existed in console gaming until now. The Bouncer is a cinematic experience:
smooth, flawless movie scenes; rich, detailed graphics; and Dolby Digital 5.1 sound
(during the movies, anyway). The motion capture is solid, though this is the kind of
heightened realism you find in movies like The Matrix or Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon. The voice acting is top notch as well. If this kind of production value is the
future of console games, I am in love.
Too bad
the gameplay sucks. Actual quote: "this movie would be really cool if it werent
for all that interactive crap." Thats a bad sign. This is, after all, a video
game. Somewhere along the line, Squaresoft must have forgotten that. There is only about
an hour and twenty minutes worth of game time in The Bouncer. Seriously. Sure, add to that
the hour or so of movie scenes and you have the approximate running time of a feature
film. But I dont care how you look at it, reaching the end of a game in under three
hours is inexcusable. And the pacing is ludicrous. After about fifteen minutes of
gorgeous, captivating opening movie sequences and title screens, I finally reached the
first fight: me and my bros against four freakish kidnappers. I was primed for action.
Less than two minutes later, the brawl was over. Less than two minutes! On it went through
another five minutes or so of movie sequences and bam! My next battle was even shorter.
And so it goes throughout the entire game; this is all you get. The interactive components
of the game amount to nothing more than cut scenes in the movie you are watching,
something like a glorified Dragons Lair. To add insult to injury, the menu screens
keep a running tally of your total in-game time, so you are constantly reminded that even
though you have been watching this game for an hour, you have only been playing
it for about twenty-five minutes. Then, as if this game needed to be more frustrating, the
save points occur before the movie scenes, and you can only skip one scene at a time. So,
whenever you die and have to reload your game, you have to spend god knows how long
skipping scene after scene just to get back to your pitiful minute-long battle.
Not that
the interactive side of this game has much to offer, anyway. The fighting system is so
shallow that mixing moves is a matter of aesthetics, or alleviating boredom, rather than
strategy. This is a pure button-pounder. And forget about combos, the characters fall down
each time they are hit, so find a move you like and use it until everyone is out cold. You
begin the game with four attacks and a guard, and earn more as the game progresses. Under
the right conditions, the three protagonists can form a group attack. These are kind of
cool, and result in a movie sequence where the characters take turns pummeling everyone in
sight, but apparently they do no damage whatsoever because afterward the bad guys just
stand up and continue as if nothing happened. The AI is miserable as well. Those fearsome
opponents who, just moments ago, were moving at break-neck speed, scaling trees, and
leaping across rooftops, stand there like apes and let you hit them when they are put in
battle. Then there is the weak level design, a terrible camera system that usually has you
running toward the camera so that you cant actually see anything, even your enemies,
and background collision problems. This is one of those games with an invisible field
around all objects so that you cant actually run into anything or jump through open
spaces.
Also, I
have to mention the moments when you are not fighting. There are moments in the game that
were intended as puzzle elements, you know, to spice things up. Let me give you an
example: the protagonists are in a runaway train that contains volatile explosives. To
release the car carrying the explosives you must find a card key. There are three boxes in
your car, what do you do? You search one, then the other, and then the third. Voila! The
card key. Puzzle solved. Hows that for tension?
Finally, I
dont know what you may have heard, maybe I was mislead, or maybe I am just dumb, but
I thought this game was supposed to have a multi-player story line. That is why I wanted
to play this game: I thought it was a next-gen Streets of Rage or Fighting Force, or
something. Not so. Story Mode is one-player only. The other characters are
computer-controlled. Yes, you are free to choose any of the three lead characters, and
change at critical plot points, building strength and skills and what-not, but dont
mistake this for branching story lines or possible replay value. The characters share one
story line, with only one leg of the game splitting them up. So, essentially all you will
get by replaying the game with each character is a different back story (easily intuited
from the main story), different catch phrases before battles (one might say
"Youll pay for that" while the another says "Youll never beat
me"), and one or two different levels. The multi-player Versus and Survival Modes are
essentially useless. With a fighting system that is barely tolerable in single-player
mode, you are better off playing any other fighting game on the market.
The Bouncer
has the strange distinction of being the one of the coolest games I have ever seen and one
of the worst that I have ever played. It simply has to be played to be believed. I mean,
it does have entertainment value outside of those snazzy cinematics, as an unintentional
comedy. My friends and I had a lot of laughs while mocking this game. It really is that
funny. Scratch that. If you paid five dollars to rent this game, its funny. If you
paid fifty dollars to buy this game, its very, very sad.