This is one good looking game... And that's about it.
I loved the original DoaX title and spend hundreds of hours collecting swimsuits and trying to build relationships with my fellow island dwellers. I embraced the sequel hoping for tighter controls and more content. I was both pleased and dismayed with this game. Let me explain.
First the good. This game looks amazing. The girls are gorgeous (come on nobody REALLY plays it JUST for the volleyball) and they animated wonderfully. The girls even have new 'bounce' physics applied individually to each breast. Their swimsuits are well designed and make good use of fabric physics. New Zack Island makes you feel like you are right there on the beach.
The game does include some new activities. Water Sliding is great fun and Jet Ski racing is an absolute blast. Around the pool you can now Butt Wreste and play the newly redesigned hopping game. There are some other activities as well but apart from the Water Slide and the Jet Ski's they are not really worth mentioning.
Taking photo's is included in the new game. Zack will send you a camera early on and you can spend as much time as you want taking photo's of yourself and your partner. These photos are then saved to the Hard Disk for later use.
Now the bad. The swimsuits look amazing alright but there are not many more than what was in the first game and a large number of them are just renamed versions of the swimsuits from the original. New Zack Island is also just a graphic re-design of the beaches from DOAX.
Water Sliding and Jet Ski racing are awesome but the rest of the activities are just a joke. You will play them once or twice and that'll about do it. Also if you wanted to play anything new in the casino you can forget it. The same old options here.
One of the more voyueristic parts of DoaX 1 was the ability to rotate the camera around your chosen girl and zoom in and out to 'appreciate' their beauty. DoaX2 sports new camera controls which are very awkward and hard to manipulate. Also the zoom function is gone.
To sum it up Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 should have been a fun voyueristic romp around a carribean island with a bunch of half naked hot chicks. Instead it is a game that is frustrating due to broken controls and a haphazzard approach to mini game design.