Dead or Alive 4 is a solid game, but as far as being recommendable to veterans and newcomers it’s a hit-or-miss.
How Dead or Alive 4 will appeal to depends on whether you’re a newcomer or veteran of the series and how complex you like your fighting games. On one hand, if you’re a long-time veteran of the Dead or Alive games, you’ll feel right at home with this installment thanks to the extensive combo lists and the more-complex-than-normal fighting system. However, if you’re a newcomer to the series than you’re more than likely going to feel a little disappointed by this title and probably will be wondering why a game like Dead or Alive has gotten the praise it has by many. Reason being is because the combo lists for each character in the game is pretty long and will require some real skill to nail down the more important moves. A lot of these useful combos are quite long and will require you to string together many controls in order to nail them down, which is likely what Dead or Alive veterans will be looking for.
While some might think that combos aren’t that important and may rely on just button-mashing, Dead or Alive 4 doesn’t exactly reward players to fighting sloppily. The AI in the game ranges from either pitifully dumb to tough as nails or at times downright impossible. For instance, the enemies may dish out long, hard-hitting combos that can easily cut down over half of a full health bar and will leave you little to no time to react and strike back. The biggest example of this can be found in the game’s final boss-Alpha 152, who flat-out breaks the rules of fair fighting. Just to give you an idea, 152 can drop your health down halfway with just one hit and will pull incredibly long combos right off the bat that will leave you with barely one-fourth a full meter of health. As a result, both skilled and amateur players will find themselves getting frustrated by this boss and likely wanting to toss their controller into their TV like a mad baseball pitcher.
Fortunately, Dead or Alive 4 serves up some great action and it’s this that makes the game stand among other fighting games. When the punches and kicks start flying during battle, the intensity of the fighting really picks up and gets even more chaotic when the characters are pulling off swift and powerful combos. And with each blow hit to each character you get a real good rumble effect from the controller. And speaking of the controller, playing the game on the Xbox 360 controller is a joy, as the controls are so smooth and it’s so easy to move around the buttons and thumbsticks. But what will really make the action better or worse for the player is how good they are with the combos. If you’re a skilled Dead or Alive gamer and can counter attacks well-which is quite tough to successfully pull against the AI, than you’re really going to appreciate the game’s action. However, if you prefer your action and combos more simplistic and following a good-for-newcomers formula than you’re probably not going to appreciate the games intense action anywhere near as much as those that are very good. This is mostly thanks to how complex the game plays and how tough and unforgiving the enemy AI can get-which will be a complete nightmare for newcomers but likely a blessing for veterans since they’re more used to this kind of treatment.
Dead or Alive 4’s single-player mode has you select one character to battle through about eight fights; give or take one or two and unlocking a video relating to that character upon completion. These videos are mostly meant for humor and pleasure, if you get my drift. Whether you’re skilled or not at the game won’t really matter in this mode, since you should be able to beat each character’s story in a matter of minutes; don’t worry, it’s not going to take you over an hour to beat each character’s story on normal difficulty. That said, the single-player barely lasts any time and beating it with each character available shouldn’t take much longer than seven or eight hours total, no matter what your skill level may be. But each time you do decide to beat a certain character’s story you’ll get an extra costume for that character. So, if you really like to see your character wearing something different than there’s some replay value offline to be found for you. But if you’re more concerned about just the action than you’re not going to get much replay value beyond the single-player if you don’t have Xbox Live-which is where most gamers will find the game’s real value at; that is, assuming they even have it.
Speaking of characters, Dead or Alive has a good roster of fighters for you to do battle with. The characters range from old-time favorites such as the swift and dangerous Ryu Hayabusa from Ninja Gaiden, the ever-popular Kasumi and even a certain someone who’s had enough of slaughtering the Covenant. There are about twenty characters total and each have their own distinct combos and moves and even veterans will want to experiment with each character to see which one fits their fighting style best. Characters like Tina and Kasumi are weak at taking hits, but are fast and swift on laying down multiple blows whereas fighters like Bass and Ein are slow but tough and lay down powerful bashing attacks. Then there are characters like Hayate and Ryu Hayabusa who are just good in-general but aren’t particularly good in one attribute.
With Dead or Alive 4 being on the Xbox 360, it’s easy to tell that the game will look good and make a good first impression when you start your first fight. The character models do look sharp and move very smoothly and accurately, which helps make for some impressive-looking moves when fighting. The environments look pretty good too, most of the time at least. While some levels such as one on a dinosaur-filled island and one outside of a dojo look great, others like the boxing arena and dance-club-like levels look dull and very low-res. That said, Dead or Alive 4’s graphics, despite how good they may look, aren’t much of an improvement over Dead or Alive Ultimate’s visuals. Nonetheless, the game looks great and even with all the intense action, it runs at a pretty smooth framerate and there’s rarely any slowdown.
Dead or Alive 4’s sound and audio are what you could call a hit-or-miss; but it hits more than it misses fortunately. What it hits on are the sound effects from not just the characters hitting each other, but also how the sound from the destruction and damaging of various levels is done. The very sound of punches and kicks making contact with the fighters is a joy to hear and really gets the gamer more entranced by the game’s action. But what the game misses on is the music and voice-overs. While not awful, the music in the game is mediocre in-general with most of the music being barely hearable techno tracks and some cheesy pop and tragedy songs. As for the voiceovers, all but one of them are Japanese, and even with the English subtitles on you still won’t be able to get over the fact that the characters all sound quite annoying when speaking. But when the action starts and the characters start beating the living daylights out of each other, the sound effects will make you forget all about what the game misses sound-wise.
Overall, Dead or Alive 4 is a solid game; it’s good, but not great. It does provide intense action, mind-blowing sound effects, and has good looks-not just graphically but the combo system and complexity of the game make the whole game a hit or miss. If you’re new to the Dead or Alive series than this is worth checking out but you’re better off renting it before deciding to buy it and get yourself destroyed by the AI. However, if you’re a veteran of the series and are looking for lots of different combos and a fighting game that’s more complex than most and want to take your battles online, than you’ll definitely be doing yourself a favor by picking up this title.