Deadly Strike Review (PS2)

Silent But Deadly

This game is ugly. This game is slow. The textures in this game make you yearn for sudden blindness, or for you to spontaneously combust and never have to see them again. Deadly Strike leaves much to be desired, but I love it all the same.

2005 was a great year in gaming. It saw the release of the Xbox 360, as well as gaming classics such as the original God of War, Resident Evil 4, Shadow of the Colossus, The Warriors and Star Wars Battlefront 2. It also saw the release of two of my favourite games of all time – Beatdown: Fists of Vengeance & Timesplitters: Future Perfect. The year was not untarnished though, and bear ugly fruit such as Shadow the Hedgehog and this abomination, Deadly Strike.

The story is a little confusing, at least at first. During my playthrough, the game crashed multiple times. I’m not too sure whether this was the quality of the disc, or just my PS2 trying to warn me that if I stepped any further into the realms of the game I would lose all sanity and hope in the gaming industry. From what I could gather, the game is set in feudal Japan, in a time where samurai and warriors roamed the countryside looking for trouble. You are able to choose between six different characters, each with their own reason to fight. I chose to play as Billy, a bulky balding American wearing nothing but sweatpants and what appeared to be an incredibly poorly textured muscle suit.

This is what you’ll see on your screen for the majority of the game, an ugly pre-rendered mess. The pitiful attempt to blend iconic gameplay elements of Dynasty Warriors with Streets of Rage. The controls are clunky, not all of the buttons are assigned, and in a similar game to this there would be two attack buttons, one for light attack and one for heavy. In this game, there is just one, and the triangle button is unassigned. The attacks are all really slow and it’s impossible to quit out of a combo, so once you’ve hit the button there is no going back for an incredibly tedious ten or so seconds as your character attempts a Zangief inspired spinning lariat, only for your opponent to sidestep out of the way and kill you in one swift, deadly strike.

The combat is actually both the games downfall as well as it’s main draw. As you would expect it, Deadly Strike has special attacks. I’d like to remind you that this game is set in a time period where samurai were the norm, as it makes the special attacks make even less sense than they already do. When you have earned enough energy to use your special, you can whip out a sniper rifle twice the size of your character, that fires explosive rounds that explode everywhere around you, sending your opponents into deep space, or maiming them in a corner begging you to kill them.

You use your high-velocity combat skills to advance through stages of levels, in which every enemy must be killed to continue. This is especially handy when your foes get stuck glitched into the landscape making them effectively impossible to kill, leaving you to restart the level or restart the entire console. After advancing through three or four stages you finally get to what the developers considered to be the thrilling part of their otherwise bland, repetitive adventure. Its not too common in todays gaming climate to feature boss fights in games. Borderlands does it very well, but Deadly strike does not.

Instead of facing down renowned samurai shoguns and adept swordsmen, you battle mythological beats, such as the Chimera and the Cyclops. There is no explanation as to why or how they exist in this land, or to why the samurai you face fight alongside them. They’re not too difficult to kill either with a few blasts from the sniper cannon. It feels a little pointless, like the whole game is spent trying to build up to something huge, and the climax is just disappointing and unfulfilling.

At the end of the day, if you want a poor man’s Dynasty Warriors, buy Orochi Warriors. If you want to shoot mythological beings with an explosive sniper rifle whilst dressed in nothing but sweatpants in a graphically challenged excuse for a field, this game is just for you – and only you, don’t burden your peers with this!