Guilty Gear X2 #Reload Review
Guilty Gear X2 #Reload is a fast-paced, well-balanced fighting game with lots of depth and variety, so it's an excellent game online. And it has plenty of offline options, too.
The mission mode is another good diversion, offering dozens of scripted stand-alone battles that can be extremely challenging. The game's computer opponents can put up a very tough fight at higher levels of difficulty, and most of the missions not only pit you against some of the toughest levels of artificial intelligence, but also handicap you in certain ways, forcing you to defeat your foe in a much shorter amount of time than usual or preventing you from jumping during the fight, among other things. You can choose to play the missions in any order, and they're a fun bonus for advanced players. Accomplishing missions, finishing the story mode with various characters, and playing through the arcade mode allows you to unlock lots of artwork for your viewing pleasure in the game's gallery, and some hidden characters are waiting to be discovered too.
Of course, the actual gameplay needs to be very good for any of this to matter. Guilty Gear X2 #Reload controls smoothly and precisely, and it is suitably rewarding either as a casual pick-up-and-play kind of game or as a strategic and competitive game--or somewhere in between. Newcomers to the series may initially be put off by the fact that characters tend to walk very slowly, but they can jump very high and very quickly, and most of them can also dash forward and backward (even in midair) at remarkable speeds, which gives the game a distinctly fast-paced feel. Four main attack buttons are used during play, letting characters punch, kick, and execute regular and heavy slashes. The "dust attack" move from Guilty Gear X has also been mapped to its own button now, allowing characters to quickly trip their opponents up with a foot sweep or launch them into the air to set them up for an air combo.
Beyond that, the game borrows just about every successful gameplay tweak seen in Capcom's and SNK's fighting games from over the years. Characters have numerous defensive moves for countering overzealous attackers, yet the game effectively penalizes overly defensive play as well. The fact that every character has an impressive "instant kill" move that can be unleashed in every round also ensures that dramatic comebacks are possible. However, these devastating moves leave you wide open, so they're not overpowering (even so, you can disable them in online play if you wish). You get the impression from Guilty Gear X2 #Reload that years of 2D fighting know-how went into its design, and the resulting game plays great. Hardcore players who've stuck with Guilty Gear over the long haul will notice improvements in the overall gameplay balance here, especially in the way the relative sizes of the characters are not just a graphical thing, but are also integral to their ability to sustain and cause damage.
The game has a couple of shortcomings that are worth mentioning. Many of the characters' moves are animated so strangely that it can be difficult to see exactly what's going on. Along those lines, the feel of the game isn't always spot-on. There are some relatively damaging moves, but they just don't seem to pack the visceral punch you'd expect. One could also nitpick about how some characters' speech becomes annoying as you hear them utter the same catchphrases while they execute their special moves over and over. Or how not all the animation is as smooth as it probably could have been, though the characters themselves are crisp and rendered at a high resolution. The game supports progressive scan displays--a standard television doesn't do full justice to the look. Unfortunately, the progressive scan mode is not properly implemented with widescreen displays; the edges of the screen get cut off, which is not necessarily detrimental in a fight, but disappointing nonetheless. On a happier note, the loading times are nearly nonexistent.
The bottom line is that this is one of the most highly evolved 2D fighting games yet--and not just from a gameplay standpoint, since Guilty Gear X2 #Reload is also among the first online-enabled home fighting games. That makes it very easy to recommend to any fan of the genre, except maybe for those who expressly dislike the game's anime-inspired character design. Considering all that it has to offer, and that it offers all this for just a fraction of a typical new game's retail price, Guilty Gear for the Xbox is a winner by a landslide.
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- GameSpot Scoregreat
Player Reviews
Critic Scores
- TeamXbox 8.5 / 10
- IGN 8.9 / 10
- Game Chronicles 9.3 / 10
- Thunderbolt 10 / 10
- GameZone 9.2 / 10
- Netjak 8.2 / 10
- GamingTrend 79 / 100
- Gamer 2.0 8.8 / 10
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- Majesco Games
- Arc Developments
- 2D Fighting
- Release: Sep 14, 2004 »
- ESRB: Teen
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