I had no interest in this game at all. Hell, the reviews alone said it was terrible. I'm a Square fanboy through and through and knowing this was made by them meant one day I would have to buy the title for my Square collection. Well, I got to rent it first and now I'll need to find it to buy I guess because damn is this game fun.
It's your typical sports game but with an arcade / Nintendo flair to it that makes it perfect for on the go gaming but don't expect to get a lot from the game if you'll be playing it at home as it's over rather quickly.
The game offers a few modes of choice. You have training which I recommend as it will help you with the touch screen controls which are simple yet have there own problems. Even after doing the training I found that my guys rarely did what I wanted them to. Steal the ball I would scream only for my guy to jump. Or I would try to dribble only for my guy to randomly toss the ball into the wall barriers. Geez...
Besides that minor complaint which isn't too big of a deal once you get the hang of it and hey, maybe my touch screen is dying because the past few games I've ran into some issues with the touch controls.
Once you do the training (which again, is optional) you can do tournaments which is the meat of the game. These has you picking three characters to play as and then to just work your way up the later. Each cup has 3-4 matches and each match has two rounds of 2 minutes. So it's very quick and rather painless.
This brings back found memories of the NBA Jam titles. You have crazy Nintendo inspired moves but instead of baskets being counting in normal points the goal of the game is to colelct coins. In true Mario fashion you'll notice "?" blocks on the ground, dribble on those to gain coins. Being hit will cause you to drop some coins and you can only have 100 coins at a time. To show you how great the AI is I'll just say I almost always won matches by 500 points, even on the hardest difficulty and cups.
Your partner AI is even worse as they will mindlessly guard your opponent but if the ball comes near them on the loose it will just ignore the ball and allow the other team to score. It's slightly annoying when that happens and there is no reason for the AI to be that brain dead.
The game does look beautiful though and Square is one of the few companies who know how to take advantage of the DS's hardware and I don't think I've be entirely let down by one of their DS titles yet. Even the music is nice and that theme song is catchy with it's chanting and hip-hip inspired beets.
Square fans also have something to look forward to with a few courts geared towards them and a slew of Final Fantasy characters like a Moogle, Black mage and a Ninja among others. The game does have some decent content to unlock but if you score like I did then most will be unlocked within a few hours.
If the game is $10 or elss I would highly recommend this for someone looking for a quick little game to play on short commutes or something. It won't last forever and the lack of actual wifi play (it does offer single cart and local multi cart play) kind of hurts it. However, it's better than any other sports game I've played on the DS thus far and it's been out for a while.
Story - N/A
Graphics - 10/10
Sound - 9/10
Control - 7/10
Game Play - 8/10
Replay Value - 6/10
Final Score - 7/10
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment