Jack Cayman returns, but three's a crowd...
Platinum Games has made a name for themselves for making some of the zaniest, most over the top, ludicrous and outlandish action games in the market. In 2009, Platinum Games introduced us to Jack Cayman, protagonist of the Wii exclusive third-person brawler MadWorld. Cayman was a chaser, or bounty hunter if you will, and on his right arm he had a two-bladed chainsaw capable of extreme savagery. Now four years later, Cayman returns for some more chasing, but this time he has to share the stage with Leonhardt "Leo" Victorion as they're after the same bounty, Maximillion Caxton.
The story begins in a bar as a task force of three barges in and begins asking questions. The leader, Nikolai, is soon met with resistance by Jack Cayman as he learns he's asking about his mark, Maximillion Caxton. Jack's quickly sucker punched into his place, and the team leaves as quickly as they came. So much for a relaxing drink. Jack now has to rev up his chainsaw arm and get back to work. Hopefully, he can find Max before the they do. He'll be out of a lot of money if he doesn't.
Anarchy Reigns is more of a spiritual successor than it is a full blown sequel. Sure, it sees the return of Jack Cayman, but Jack has to sit half the game out for newcomer Leo. You can start the game with Jack Cayman's "Black Side" or Leo's "White Side", but after four chapters, you'll be trading off. Mission structures follow a simple formula. After being dropped in one of the game's four hub levels, you roam the apocalyptic deserts and shanty towns and urban areas beating anyone you come across to a slushy pulp. As you smack people down, you earn points. Earn enough points, and a Free Mission unlocks, which will you earn even more points from. Continue to earn points and a Main Mission unlocks, which lets you progress the story further. Although Jack and Leo share similar missions, both of their stories are unique enough to make each campaign distinct.
Combat is less creative than it was in MadWorld. Although you still earn points, you have no inventive opportunities to dispatch your enemies. You can still throw spikes through their heads and bind them with tires, but that's really the only implementations that carried over from MadWorld. You'll spend most of your time mashing Square and Triangle to unleash basic combos while unleashing your Killer Weapon to dispatch gangs of thugs and deal serious damage to the game's bigger baddies. As you're fighting, you have a meter that builds up and when full, you can enter Rampage Mode. In this state, you move and attack extremely rapidly and you have limitless energy for your Killer Weapon. Unlike most games' similar overdrive states, Rampage lasts a good while, letting you go through two or three ridiculously huge mutants before wearing off.
You can block and dodge, but the game penalizes you for blocking and dodging too much. If you do so, you're stunned and become a sitting duck. There's also a serious problem with the combat, as you can't cancel out of an attack animation, and it makes a few of the game's tougher moments more frustrating than need be. The game's always giving you items to use at your disposal, though. You can get item picks up from shields to invisibility cloaks to instant charges for your Rampage mode, and you can also get weapons such as grenades, rifles and lovely, lovely rocket launchers.
The game does try to mix up the action a bit, though. Free missions are usually no more than "beat up this many guys in this amount of time", but some are a little more arcadey, such as knocking balls into goals. Story missions might have you going head to head with another character, or you might end up fighting two or three characters with one or two partners of your own. There's even a multistage battle with an electricity-spewing kraken that's one of the gamer's finer moments. For the most part, though, the game's a cakewalk, with most enemies just serve as punching fodder, letting you pounding on them without much resistance. Yet, when the game decides to finally get challenging, the spikes seem a bit unfair. If you really want a challenge, though, it's best to play it on Hard from the onset.
As for characters, the game has a few returning faces, such as the Asian cutie Rin Rin, the curvaceous yet deadly Mathilda, and everyone's favor pimp Blacker Baron. What's even better is that some missions let you choose who you want to play as. If you really loved Blacker Baron from MadWorld, being able to play as him might be worth the price of admission alone. Of course, there are a lot of new faces as well, such as Onkie, a snout-faced scavenger of parts; Durga, the cybernetic feline human; and Sasha, Leo's seductive partner. All these characters are unlocked as you encounter them in the campaign for use in the game's training and multiplayer modes.
It's easy to tell that not much money was spent on the game's production values. The visuals are obviously dated, as they aren't technically impressive at all. Textures aren't very sharp, and the environments and objects are built rather simply, but the game performs very smoothly. The game can throw a good number of enemies at you, while also doing crazy random things such as carpet bombing the ground while you fight, having an enormous excavator weave its way towards you, or even blind you as a twister summons up a gigantic sandstorm. Its art direction is the only thing that really captures the eye, as the character designs are quite interesting. For some fans of MadWorld, they'll be disappointed that the game's in full color now, abandoning the black and white noir style, and also trading in the red blood for other colors of fluid, such as blue for mutants and gray for cybernetic enemies.
It is a noisy game, though. If you love your action games loud, Anarchy Reigns reigns supreme. Using your Killer Weapons produces satisfying sounds of flesh being rendered with every swipe. Every powerful punch and slam and kick is accompanied with impactful thumps and whams and slams. The soundtrack is composed of a mix of hip hop and electronica and for fans of those genres, the official soundtrack is worth hunting down. The voice acting is pretty solid as well, with performances ranging from campy to deadly serious. If you loved the voice acting of Jack Cayman and Blacker Baron, you'll love it just as much in Anarchy Reigns.
The most appealing feature of the game is obviously its price tag of 29.99. MadWorld debuted at 49.99 and unfortunately was roughly three hours long. Anarchy Reigns is at least twice as long, and although it doesn't give you the same level of creative brutality, it does give you another absolutely crazy campaign. Plus, if you are into mulitplayer, it lets you whale on your friends with one of 16 different characts. Unfortunately, the game really does want you to play it more online than off, as the cursor actually defaults to Multiplayer when you first start the game up. MadWorld fans will be disappointed that they didn't get a true sequel to a game that definitely deserved one, but it's still fun nonetheless and the 30 dollar price tag makes it much easier to forgive.