Pros• Changing environments• 4 player simultaneous play with both cooperative and competitive options • Vast number of items to be found and created |
Cons• Course in every mode only consists of 5 stages• Online features removed from North American release • Elimination of story mode |
Bottom LineA good contender for “Party Game of the Year”, but solo players may feel left out of the best parts of the action.No more “four-play” jokes, please. Power Stone introduced some very unique concepts into the standard formula of fighting games, but some felt it didn’t go far enough to fill its advertising promises. While the characters could ‘go anywhere’, they were restricted to the limited space of a cubic arena. The pick-up items all started to look the same after a while, and even a novice player could bring a quick end to any battle by simply getting all three power stones. Power Stone 2 finally makes good on the promises of its predecessor, but due to some shortsightedness in its localization process, fails to realize the grandest of its own. |
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Review
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Powerstone 2
With the advent of Sega.net and Sega’s push for online gaming, it’s quite disheartening to see that Capcom’s standard Dreamcast localization process still involves removing a game’s online features. This is made worse by the fact that Power Stone 2, one of the first 4-player fighting games to see a console release, was so perfectly suited to online play. Without this capability, PS2 has lost one of its best and most unique selling points.
Still, PS2 is far from being just another fighting game. In addition to the unique free-roaming concept of its predecessor, PS2 adds the unique thrill of four player simultaneous action, making it a strange sort of cross between a fighting game and a party game. As in other four player games, things can be difficult to keep track of on the screen, especially if two people happen to choose the same character, but at the same time, creates an electrifyingly fast pace that the fighting genre has never seen before. Power Stone 2 also features vast improvements on the weapons and pick-up items of the original Power Stone. PS2 features a list of literally hundreds of items that can be picked up and used in battle, from the old flamethrowers and bazookas to roller blades, megaphones, and even a little black kitty that can be used in various ways. Some of these items can be found in the one-player Adventure Mode, but most are obtained in a special item shop, where items that have been obtained previously in the Adventure Mode can be bought, sold, or combined to make new items. If a combination fails, players receive a coupon that can be used to find some of the more elusive items in a special roulette game. It can take literally weeks of playing through Adventure mode and mixing the items to even come close to finding them all. What fighting game sequel would be complete without the addition of a few new characters? PS2 introduces four new deviants into asylum who are even more outlandish than the returning cast. It would have been nice to know more about them, but sadly, Capcom seems to have decided that story sequences are no longer necessary in fighting games. It is a decision that robs PS2 and in fact all of Capcom’s recent releases of a great deal of their character and playability, as fighting for fighting’s sake alone, or even for the sake of finding items, rapidly becomes tiresome for the single player. Power Stone 2’s main focus seems to be on multiplayer action, and this is where it truly excels. The online functions would have made this a truly excellent game; without them single players are bound to feel somewhat forgotten, but even they should be able to enjoy it for at least the span of an average rental. Like a good party, PS2 burns brightly but quickly comes to an end, leaving a feeling of satisfaction partly because it did not linger for too long. James Tapai |
