Deadly Arts Review

Deadly Arts is a bandwagon-hopping 3D fighting game from Konami. While it has one or two interesting modes, the gameplay is incredibly generic, and the character design is completely drab.

Where Deadly Arts differs from other 3D fighters is in its create-a-fighter option. The option is surprisingly full-featured when compared with the rest of the game. You can pick from various hairstyles, body shapes, heights, and faces when dealing with your fighter's appearance. Once finished, you pick one of the stock characters to fight against. As you win, you'll be able to learn moves from the other fighters, eventually piecing together the best moves from each of the other characters. The other interesting mode is the tag mode, where you form a three-person team. You can switch characters at any time, but just like baseball, once you take a guy out, he's out for the rest of the match.

The game plays similarly to Virtua Fighter, in that you have punch, kick, block, and evade buttons. The combo system is fairly simplistic, allowing people to pound on one button and get two or three hits. You can also strike opponents when they're down. If time runs out, various scores are tabulated, and the score leader, rather than the energy leader, wins.

The characters in Deadly Arts lack life. They all reek of the cookie-cutter character design common in second- and third-tier fighters. Also, the character animation is really lackluster. The game's graphics are very plain, and the stages can cause quite a bit of slowdown, especially when they have to use foreground transparencies to keep the characters visible.

Deadly Arts is just too basic. It doesn't have any truly distinguishing characteristics, and the gameplay just isn't interesting in any way. Don't waste your time or money on this one.