Yet another awesome game i will not forget for a long time from Platinum Games.
The game features both a single player mode in order to play as two different sides of the story and a multiplayer mode to clash with your friends and take on some crazy people into a massive fight.
Gameplay - "Excellent" (10/10)
To put simply the gameplay is nothing short of fun and addicting, the combat is easy to get used to and the game provides a good tutorial for players to master the basics of the game and learn some cool combos in order to brutally murder their enemies, the game is also very fast-paced with random event occurring in order to spice things up a bit and provide a much more Antarctic vibe to the game with bomber planes, crazy huge trucks, tornadoes, black holes, you name 'em!
Overall a sold combat system and crazy additions that make the game super chaotic and fun to play.
Presentation - "Awesome" (9/10)
The soundtrack is full of cool and neat dirty rap songs that adds a lot of depth to the game and really outshines the whole feel of the game by making it look like a really messed up world which is all about brutally murdering things and sexy women, on the other hand the graphics are good however while the graphics look visually pleasing and fit the environment of the whole game it seems like it does not have a lot of that Platinum Games charm that i like so much, don't get me wrong i like to see overly-muscular men battle each other and make sexual jokes on each other but i really wish that Platinum would have added a bit more then that.
Story - "Good enough to keep me addicted but then it got short" (8/10)
The story features two sides; "Black side" and "White side" however do not let the game fool you, there are no "good side & bad side" situations here, the story is simply split up to take a view from different perspectives, one side from the people that work for the government and in the other side the team of bounty hunters that do what they must to get their pay.
While this is a nice addition to the game the story itself from both sides is really short and it does take a bit of time to actually understand what is going on.
The way you so to say "unlock" the story is a very odd choice, there are two types of missions; "Free missions" that you do to gather points and when you reach a certain amount of points you unlock more "Free missions" and "Story missions" now the points system depends on how well you did during the mission, if you scored an Platinum Medal (The highest possible one) then you will unlock the next mission immediately yet if you do it not as well say a Silver Medal (The 3rd place medal) you will have to do a bit of grinding or do the mission again in order to move on and i personally no not like fillers like this yet i did not have lots of problems with it since when i did i still enjoyed doing the missions just to beat the crap out of things for fun.
In short, they could have improved it here and there but its not bad at all.
Replayability - "While you cant do much after beating the story, there is still multiplayer you can jump into" (8/10)
Once you finish both the story modes you are left to improve your ranks in missions and unlock more characters you may missed on your way, however the multiplayer of the game is not bad.
While getting into the multiplayer aspect of the game can be a bit annoying since probably everybody will be using Garudas infinite combo and other unbalanced aspects, the game is still fun to play with people your rank and with friends that wanna spill some blood and whack the buttons to death, or if you prefer to do a team battle or a survival mode where you and your 2 teammates get a hoard of enemies coming towards you and you have to kill them all as fast as possible until the timer runs out.
In short the multiplayer has lots of verity to it but the imbalance of the characters might annoy newcomers that go off against the hardcore-infinite-combo players and a fix for that will certainly improve the game for me.
Conclusion - 9.0
The game is very fun and good to look at, some might argue that the game is not very thrilling but i on the other hand after completing the game over 4 times am still thrilled by the fast combat and the amount of blood i shed off my enemies.
The multiplayer might be a bit unbalanced and can be very easily avoided by playing with other people, friends or bots.
The Story is addictive and keeps you entertained for the whole game however it is a bit short and if only Platinum could have made it longer it would have been a much better experience overall.
Thank you for reading this review.
~J-Jazz