A visually attractive game with a concept full of potential falls flat with its lack of activities and interaction
I got this game at the bargain bin over three years ago and judging with what I had played, I wouldn’t have spent more than the $25 tag.
The game takes place outside Dead or Alive continuity and assumes Zack’s ending from Dead or Alive 3 comes true and he strikes it rich. He then buys himself an island and hosts a faux tournament exclusive to the DOA females. As far as plot goes, this is the extent of it. The rest of the game is spent doing four major things.
The first is of course, the volleyball game, which earns you Zack dollars used to purchase various goods mentioned later. Its mechanics produce a competitive and responsive match-up despite being simplistic. For those who bought the game for the volleyball (and there aren’t many I assume), some strategy can be played. Players can give orders to their AI by tactically placing them to set-up, block or spike. Landing points can get difficult because it’s quite easy to volley even the strongest spikes. Games with numerous amounts of volleying are to be expected.
Second, players will spend a good amount of their time courting other females. Zack Island has three stores, an Accessory Shop, which obviously sells, accessories, the Zack of Trades, which sells all kinds of weird items and the Sports shop, which sells the items that the game couldn’t be without, bikinis. Each item can be bought and gift-wrapped and given to any girl of choice but of course, like a dating sim, all the girls have their likes and dislikes.
Giving girls gifts either makes them love you or hate you depending on your choice. Getting in good relations with the girls of course gives you a better chance to partner with them or receive gifts in turn. If anything should motivate the digital perv in you it should be that certain suits are only available to specific characters including the scandalous one-million-dollar string bikini, Venus (Google it).
Thirdly, if you’re not hitting on girls or balls, you’re either just relaxing and watching sexy gravure scenes or playing the mini-game, platform hopping, which is exactly what it is. You tap a button to hop over little platforms over the length of the pool and you earn a few Zack dollars. It’s a waste of time, really.
Finally, once the day is done you retreat to your cottage and either send someone a gift, go to bed or gamble your money in the casino. You play all the games by yourself including poker, black jack, slots and roulette.
That pretty much consists the gameplay. Maybe for a few hours or so you’ll dig it out of sheer curiousity and that new good feeling you get each time you try out a game for the first time. But it gets old fast, apart from the gambling. I’m most concerned about the lack of activities. We’re on a beach and there are no water activities or beach activities apart from the volleyball game itself. Equally as disconcerting is the lack of character-interactive activities. Why can’t I play poker with the other girls? Where are the mini-games where we play with them? Girls are supposedly social creatures but you wouldn’t know it from the shortage of activities.
It’s too bad because the graphics were topnotch and the game was one of the best-looking Xbox games around at the time. The engine was from DOA and made the character movements during volleyball very graceful and athletic-like. The music was bland but at least featured a Bob Marley track.
The whole hot chicks from DOA clad in bikinis playing volleyball in a lone island is a cool concept that had unlimited potential. But like most disappointments, it fell miles short with its severe lack of activities and character interaction. The game started out promising but after a few hours, it’d slowly lose its appeal and degenerate into a redundant exercise of wooing girls , playing volleyball, gambling and watching random gravure scenes in between.
I can’t recommend this game for everyone. But if you love DOA as much as I do and you know how to get games at bargain prices, then by all means, indulge yourself.