Great violent fighting game for the price.
I downloaded the demo and my friend and I played it for hours. There was no doubt about it, I was going to buy it and when it went on sale for $4.99 days before Christmas, I took that as an early Christmas present from Santa.
Soul Calibur and Mortal Kombat may be pretty, but you don't have the ability to chop people up like in this game.
I guess you could say it has PS2 graphics but it's no big deal, I found them decent and certainly not horrible.
I didn't have any problems with the controls. It never felt like it was just a button masher. You're not going to do anything fancy like in Mortal Kombat but you don't need to remember a convoluted set of controls - the most complex move is pressing two buttons for your fighter's special move.
What sells the game for me is that you can chop off your opponents head, arm, leg or impale them with a throwing weapon.
Two moments stand out for me. Playing as the Spartan and right off the bat, throwing a spear at my opponent and severing his head. Another time, my friend cut off my head and arm with one swoop of his sword.
If you get an arm chopped off, you're not quite done for as you still have a few seconds to act before you bleed out. Beating a guy while your arm is cut off and spurting blood never gets old.
The game claims to have online support but I can never find a match and I assume this function is simply broken or not available but it's no big deal because this game shines when you have a friend over.
If you have no friends to play against, you can do the arcade mode in which you fight against a series of opponents. There's an unlimited amounts of continues and it's pretty easy to beat the computer opponent. You should be able to beat the arcade mode with each of the eight fighters in an hour or less.
There's also a battle mode where you just fight one battle.
A few extra modes would have been nice but that's just me being greedy - the versus mode is more than enough.
This game reminds me of the old game Die By The Sword for the PC in which you could chop off arms and legs and this game seems to be me to be the spiritual successor to that game.
For five bucks, it was a great deal. For ten bucks, it's still a great deal. Hell, if the game had been thirty bucks, I still think it would have been worth it.
If you have any doubts, try the demo - that's what you'll be getting with the full version, just with extra fights and locations.
It's one of the games that when you've finished a match, you want to play just one more time and while it may not have the polish of a big time release, it certainly has all the fun I could expect from a fighting game.