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Review: Power Stone 2 |
“Eat six barrels of hot lead, kind sir”
If you’ve ever wanted to see a demure-looking blonde woman with a dainty parasol and an Edwardian-era dress pick up a chaingun and absolutely blow the crap out of a buck-toothed overweight chef while the airship they’re standing on falls apart under their feet — you’ve come to the right place, because Capcom’s PowerStone 2 is a feast of over-the-top pyrotechnics and an utter orgy of comic-book destruction. It’s everything the original should have been and a lot lot more.
It opens with the end credits sequence of the original PowerStone (remember Fokker flying across that unconvincingly flat texture-mapped sea?) Well, seconds into that, the sky darkens, lightning flashes, and a huge stone castle appears. The plane (which is somehow carrying all 15 combatants) crashes and you have to fight your way to freedom. That’s the story. Great huh? I’ve wasted 55 words when I could have said “Place crashes in castle, fight to escape”.
Upon beginning the game, you are presented with a series of game modes. “Basic” is your standard one-on-one fight, the most like the first game. Secondly there’s “Arcade” which is a four player battle, in which the first two to die lose, then “Original”, where you can custom-build a battle, choosing the number of human/CPU players, who they are and where you fight, and lastly there’s “Adventure.”
Adventure is similar to “basic” — but everything you pick up is tallied up after the fight, and the coins you collect during combat are added up, and you can spend them in the Item Shop - where, I assume, all the items you can’t currently obtain (and there are a lot! About 150 I think) during a fight can be bought. The shop lists the items in text form…Japanese text…so I don’t have clue what I’m buying.
Whichever mode you play in, the game remains essentially the same. Winning fights advance you through the castle, you get to choose your first stage, and then two portals appear offering you further choices after each fight. There’s a mid-boss (a giant robo-Sphinx) and the end boss is a tough fight…
The bare bones of the first game remain - hit the other player until their life gauge is empty, use whatever weapons and objects are at hand, collect three powerstones and transform into a super version of your character and let all hell break loose. The controls are the same (attack, jump and “item”) - and, rather wonderfully, the horrible jump-kicks are gone. If you remember PS1 — jumping and pressing “attack” would result in a super-fast, high priority, deadly accurate homing jump kick. No more! Now it’s just a flailing attack performed in the air. I’m so glad they got rid of those.
There are a number of further enhancements that make PS2 a far better game than the original. First, there are no rounds anymore. It’s a single fight. And when you consider that the fights can last about 5 minutes each (often longer with 4 players) — it’s a welcome change.
The biggest change is the arenas themselves. The first games’ were one-room locations with plenty of items and interactive features to assist in the fight.
There is so much more of all of those things now. The arenas are bigger (the camera is more zoomed out than in PS1) and they evolve as the fight progresses. Some of these stages are just brilliant.
For example, the temple of doom. It starts in a stone room. You fight here, throwing stone tombs at each other, hitting pillars to dislodge boulders and avoiding spiked floors. After a while, the floor collapses and the fight moves into a long corridor, where a giant stone ball begins rolling after you. Players must run for their lives, jumping pits and walls, (or throwing other players under the rock :) until they reach a door, which entering leads to a second antechamber. Here are pots of potions that either dizzy or power up the player, and, bizarrely, a giant stone slot machine, which can be activated by attacking it — and getting three in a row can lead to it dispensing coins, bombs or a laser beam! All this in one stage! With the added task of actually fighting the other player(s) while this is going on - things get seriously chaotic, and, just some times, a little confusing.
Another of my favourite stages is the Submarine level. Two submarines sailing along - and the fight begins. During this time, the subs will submerge and reappear, small islands of ice will float by, and, after a few minutes, there will be an iceberg warning, and the submarine crashes into a huge chunk of ice, and the fight transfers onto it! Genius!
Some stages also have gun emplacements that you can climb into, missiles and catapults waiting to be launched, and vehicles to drive and fly!
My biggest bitch about the original game was the fact that there simply wasn’t enough fighting, and too much collecting the stones, powering up and killing the other player. Things have changed, in my opinion for the better. For a start you now have seven stones instead of three. This allows two players at once to go into “Power Drive” mode - evening the odds pretty well.
Secondly, given the huge increase in other methods of attack - the stones just aren’t as necessary as they used to be, it’s possible to fight without anyone powering up at all — even when fighting other CPU players. Of course it can still be done - and the attacks are still pretty devastating, but they seem easier to avoid (given the larger arenas) and when there are four players on-screen — you’re less likely to be targeted.
Given the amount of on-screen chaos — it has to be noted that there is some slowdown. You do have to work to get it to happen — have two characters go into Power Drive, while a third fires a gun while the submarine crashes into the iceberg and it almost grinds to a halt, but generally speaking it’s pretty rare. Just a little something for the “60fps” bitches to whinge about there…
I don’t think there’s a massive improvement in the standard of the visuals over the first game. The stages are bigger and more ambitious, but retain the same level of detail and colour as the first game. The returning characters look exactly the same, though there are a few new win poses, and there are four new main characters (though there are more secret ones), Pete the tiny thief who looks like KOF99’s Bao, Accel the cowboy, Gourmand the fat chef and Julia the elegant 18th Century dame. I still find the characters a bit stiff and unappealing, but they’re a lot more “fantasy” based than other 3D fighters, and there’s just so many bad jokes you can get from the name “Fokker”….
If you hated the announcers in SFA3 or MvC2 — I have to tell you that it seems that the ‘variety of cheesy phrases spoken in a camp manner’ is the way Capcom are heading with regards to in-game announcers: it’s the same thing here, though this guy sounds so earnest and simple - it’s hard to hate him. Especially when he’s encouraging you, giving you advice on beating the mid-boss, or perceptively stating “it’s an alien!” when you come across a huge alien monster at the top of the space station level.
I’m glad to report the annoying phrases that kept cropping up in the first game have been both reduced in number and annoying-ness. The guy still says “oh no!” — but it’s only some of the time when a hard attack connects and it’s much softer and quieter than before. The stupid “GET!” has gone too, this time for good.
The music is still an un-memorable mix of soft rock, weak orchestra and bland techno, and, except for the pleasingly ominous “lift ascending” tune, is nothing to get excited about.
If you don’t read Japanese, the vast tracks of options, menus and sub-menus are a real pain to navigate, all the menus and options are in Japanese - “of course they are, it’s an import” you say, you smug freak, but when you think of the amount of English in SF3 or KOF99 — there’s a big difference.
Perhaps acknowledging the slightly shallow gameplay, our friends at Capcom have seen fit to absolutely stuff PS2 full of enough extras and secrets to keep even the most moronic of Dead or Alive 2 whiners happy. Yes, longevity is the name of the game here (don’t try to order the title “longevity” from your import store….that’s just not funny) and rather than have a deeply involving and challenging fighting game, the replay value comes instead from the need to complete the game over and over and over again to unlock secrets and earn enough money from the “Adventure” mode to buy extra items. Did that sound a bit bitter? Good.
A slight word of warning - after playing for a few hours - I began to feel slightly motion sick - I don’t know if it’s the constant action or the rotating “camera” or what, but as a guideline, if you ever felt ill playing “Sonic Adventure”, “Doom 2″ or “Turok” — you might feel it here too. On the other hand, it could just be me.
As I wrote in my 1st impressions - it’s still not that much of a fighting game — more a cartoony 3rd person FPS game with simple punches, throws and small arenas. But I’m a lot happier because the problems from the first game have been either fixed or glossed over with compensating features, and there’s just *so* much to do and see, it really makes for a wonderful gaming experience. Go get it!
