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Deadliest Warrior Gameplay Video and Review
JudoChinX
July 23, 2010
I suppose it was only a matter of time before Spike TV, the network for young adult males, released a game. Deadliest Warrior: The Game is a recent release on the Xbox Live Arcade and will eventually come to the Playstation Network. The concept--though a tad contrived--had me intrigued and had the execution of Deadliest Warrior been a little bit better, I think this could have been a unique little gem to fill the void in original download only fighting games.
The premise of the game, like the TV program it's based on, is to recreate fights between warriors from various time periods and locales. Anyone who lived during the early years of the original PlayStation remembers Bushido Blade: a first-of-its-kind weapon based fighting game that focused more on planning and timing than combos. Rounds of combat ended quickly by landing only a few attacks. Deadliest Warrior: The Game takes the same approach. Players are rewarded more by perfectly executing a couple of moves than they are by keeping combos flowing and special meters full. Also like Bushido Blade, players have the ability to roam through the arenas, which are certainly larger than traditional fighting games, to retreat or gain the advantage.
Visually, the game is pretty bland, and even though it is a download-only game, I would have loved to see a little bit more done to make it look appealing. That's not to say that I expected the best animation and most detailed of models, but there's certainly a happy medium that was not achieved. Even worse than lacking graphical fidelity, the game has no style. It's not just a budget issue. It's what appears to be a total lack of imagination. Considering this is Spike Games we're talking about, you can be assured that there's a bit of violence to help spruce up the place. Blood squirts and limbs are severed. As with the rest of the game, these aspects aren't particularly good looking, but they do their job by giving players something to reward them for their victories.
Sadly, fighting games are made or broken by character design and the combatants in Deadly Warrior are as vanilla as they come. I understand that Spike Games couldn't invent new characters. That would obviously fly in the face of the idea of fights between those from different time periods, but I would have loved to have seen the characters be given a little bit of personality. Why couldn't the characters have been given real names? The Ninja is literally named Ninja and the same goes for every other class in the game. They're simply named what they are. They didn't bother giving any of these characters a background story, interesting costumes, or anything of the sort. They're plain and boring. The game's environments and characters might have been lifted from the history books, but they certainly didn't have to be uninteresting. This seems like a true waste of potential.
The combat system is probably the most redeeming aspect of Deadliest Warrior. Although I found it to be a bit on the sluggish and unresponsive side of the fence, I still detected a level of complexity that many are bound to find refreshing. Each warrior has several different weapons to be used whenever they'd like. You can quickly switch between chosen weapons to best fit any situation you come across and there's a block-and-counter system that can change the tide of battle. The trouble is getting past everything else to get to the good stuff.
In the end, whether or not you should play Deadliest Warrior depends on what you value most in your games. Do you like the game to look good? Then you're going to want to pass. Do you want the game to be easy to pick up and play? Again, you'll want to pass. If you can get past the rougher edges of the game and settle in for a complex combat experience that's sure to wet your gaming nostalgia whistle, then this might be just what the doctor ordered. Just know that this is not something everyone is going to appreciate. Thankfully, there is a demo available, so you can figure this out without having to commit to a purchase.
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