Dead Warrior: Reckoning

There's a story somewhere in Dead Warrior: Reckoning, but it's easy to miss and unimportant to boot. Missions begin and end with brief cutscenes that are driven by some text. Speech, obviously, would have been better at conveying this message. The text has something to do with a hostage that needs rescuing, and then at some point you switch from shooting Triad gangsters in the face to shooting armored militia members in the face. But considering the drudgery of Reckoning's gameplay, none of this really matters much.

[GRAPHICS:]

This game looks decent, not good, not bad, just decent. The graphics are kind of dark and the textures are fairly bland and simple. The characters look better than the rest of the environment and Jack and Shadow look like they had a little extra time put into them. The bad guys on each level are pretty much carbon copies of each other, with very little variety. However they vary quite a bit form stage to stage. The frame rate is fairly constant and I have only noticed slowdown on a few occasions when the action was particularly heavy. The aliasing is not bad and very much improved over other games. There is a little bit of the ghosting effect but nothing annoying.

[SOUND:]

Sound is not this games strong point, the guns all sound fine and the screams of dying opponents are hearty and disturbing. Whatever music there is, it is completely downed out by the gunfire and noises from injured adversaries. There is no voice acting for any part of the game, and while this is not uncommon in games it would have been nice. Overall the sound is just average and other than the guns there is really nothing that sounds particularly good.

[STORY:]

My god, what a disaster this is. This has to be the worst writing I have ever seen, I honestly think a junior high student could have written a better and more compelling story. I wasn't expecting much from this genre but come on, this is pathetic. Example: “Abandon churches aren't normally so well guarded, this was defiantly the mafia lodge.” That's it, that's the opening to a level, there are about ten of these that you must draw a story from. From the brief cut scenes that are so poorly written I have gathered that your character is a police officer and he needs to rescue a female hostage from the forces of evil. That's petty much it, you run through levels shooting grunts and the occasional boss and then you get subjected to another small snippet of “story”.

[GAMEPLAY:]

This is where this game shines, it may not control all that well and the camera may be a bit fidgety but make no mistake about it this game is fun. The game consists of going through various levels killing everybody in sight. You have many ways to accomplish this, including guns, your dog, and the ever popular takedowns.

The controls are generally good, you use the (X) button to shoot the right trigger to lock on and the circle button for takedowns. You can also do slow motion dives by pushing and holding triangle. You move Jack with the analogue stick which works well enough. Overall the controls are quite good and make use of most of the buttons. Targeting can be a little problematic when there are more than one opponent on either side of you but generally presents little trouble.

The camera can't be controlled by the player which can be annoying at times, but it rarely gets stuck and keeps up with the action well.