There are two kinds of gamer when it comes to beat-em-ups. There are your technical geniuses who can spin combos together quicker than Bruce Lee brushed his teeth. Their matches are like a virtual ballet, with their characters moving so smoothly you’d think it was choreographed. Then there are button mashers. These tend to be girlfriends, grandmothers or people who generally can’t be bothered reading the manual.
I’ve always been a button masher because the gap between the elite and the rest was so huge that you were either great or not. And I didn’t have the patience to spend the time learning, and why would I bother when I could load up a Hockey game and lay down some smack? But now I’m all grown up, and so there’s no such luxury allowed, so this was going to be a real experience for me. I started with some research and spent some time playing previous versions of Dead or Alive before comparing it to this one.
So was I more Jacky Chan or Jackie Collins?
One of the most noticeable things is that the counter functions are less forgiving. In order to pull a counter move off, your timing has to be impeccable. This instantly makes DOA4 a more challenging title. And the counters themselves appear to inflict less damage than earlier in the series, which means that in order to become advanced at this game, you have to attack. No more blocking for as long as possible before waiting for a gap, you have to hunt or be hunted.
The characters have such a diverse range of skills and styles, that it will take some serious training time in the sparring programs to master each one. That said, the fighters are all equally balanced with strengths and weaknesses carefully spread out. As is the norm with fighting games, the more petite combatants are more acrobatic and quick, whereas the larger behemoths make up for their lack of speed with brute strength. The only poorly weighted fighter is the final boss. Alpha-152 sweeps you aside far too easily before transporting to another side of the arena so you can’t retaliate.
18 characters remain from DOA3, with 3 new ones in the form of the trainee geisha Kokoro, a young Brit named Elliot and a Mexican-styled wrestler La Miriposa. The worse-kept secret in gaming of course is that a female Halo Spartan named Nicole is the 22nd character. There is plenty of speculation on the internet as to where Nicole sits in the Halo story, with some suggestions that she is actually Cortana before she became a holographic babe.
You’ll only be able to play as 16 at first, with the other 5 being unlocked through-out the story mode. In addition to the counter changes, Tecmo also added new moves for several characters forcing players to find new strategies and fighting styles. Some characters now have new combo throws and there are quite a few new combination reversals as well.
Game modes are as deep as fighting modes get, with a story mode taking up the most of your time. Here you must complete the game with each character at a time, unlocking costumes and other characters as you go. Here in lies the problem with DOA4, it’s a story that’s not a story. There is no plot as such, just random background stories with no direct link to any of the characters are often repeated when perhaps they shouldn’t, throwing the whole thing out of context. Here the game becomes repetitive and at times, strange. One such cut scene has your character saving another from the jaws of a T-Rex. Instead of forming a bond with that fighter, they proceed to try and beat seven shades out of you. No rhyme or reason for most of these cut scenes. You’ll often be wishing they hadn’t bothered trying to put a story together if they were going to just hash it like this.
The Time Attack is as it suggests, played with the aim to polish off your opponents in the quickest times possible to win challenges. Survival Mode is a “run the gauntlet” style affair, trying to beat as many opponents as possible without losing. Other modes include a team mode, a versus mode (basic 2-player option) and a sparring, or tutorial, mode in which you can practice and learn moves against an opponent who offers the retaliation prowess of a tree.
