Bloody Roar 3

Pros • Newbie-friendly controls • Eye-candy coming out of your---well, lots of eye-candy… • Vibrant and even funny character designs	Cons • This third incarnation brings nothing new to the table • The fighting-system’s “simplicity” borders on lobotomy territory
Bottom Line Good entry level fighter but if fighting games are your passion, your “thing,” your bread and butter, this one is just a little stale…and has that low-fat goop on it. Kick ‘Em When They’re Up, Kick ‘Em When They’re Down I gotta admit it, when I first played this game’s immediate pregenitor, Bloody Roar 2, it had me fooled, for a little while: With its hip, flashy (and oh-so-geeky) world of “Zoanthropes”--otherwise-normal humans genetically predisposed to change into their primal bestial alter-egos under certain extreme conditions, said humans including Jenny the goth-bat chick or Stun, the WWF man-insect hybrid--I totally missed for an hour or two the fact that would soon become obvious: In a way, it was more of a point-five upgrade than a true sequel. Déjà vu strikes again in this suspiciously-familiar and solid-frame-rate PS2 descendant (in PC terms, we’re almost up to Bloody Roar 2.1 here).

First of all, it looks better, which despite the obvious climb in platform status (PSX to PS2) is a little surprising: Nobody complained about the previous game’s graphics, with its out-of-control character designs and absolute show-stopper, acid-psychosis special effects when the rage meter maxed and the Specials and Lethals began flying. What players did complain about--especially veteran fighter-fans--was pretty much everything else. Those same people can be heard complaining today about Bloody Roar 3, if they can even be bothered. Despite its terrific particle-effect, motion-blur visual doodads, it’s a rather simple game system, pointedly geared toward casual and even first-time gamers; Single-button attacks/combos mean that the game can be quickly picked up by even first-timers, so BR3 is definitely a good choice if you want to lure, say, an unsuspecting girlfriend or office-mate into console fighter-gaming (another good choice, with perhaps a little more tactical dressing, would be Tech Romancer, but that’s another review).

Despite the return of over a dozen characters from the previous games, each of which have above-average design and personality (bats, bunnies, babes, bugs or ‘bots, I guarantee you there is something in here for you), the newcomer need not be overwhelmed by the potential choices--all the fighters’ abilities are either perfectly-balanced or sufficiently whitebread (depending on how you view these things), so get right in there and start bashing, paying particular attention to slowly (but violently) smacking your opponent into a tight corner, at which point you can start really working on him/her/it; in another, deeper game it would seem like a gameplay oversight, but here it’s all part of what, for lack of a better word, I shall call the tactics. Don’t worry--those spectacular man-to-monster morphs can seal the doom or turn the tide of a combatant’s game in an instant anyway (it’s why they call ‘em “breakers”).

Repeat: This is yet another in a relatively simple series (albeit the best so far), a perfectly competent and really good-looking fighter that can only be recommended to game players of the non-hardcore breed; this fact is neither a good thing nor a bad thing, just a thing. “Thing” could, in fact, be considered the key word here, and if you want the occasional fifteen minutes of bug- beast- and bot-like things wailing away on each other--without having to worry about huge investments of time for mastering combos that read like ballistics equations--Bloody Roar 3 is your game.

All others, stick to Soul Caliber until we figure out how to get this Celebrity Deathmatch engine working correctly.

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