Sword of the Berserk: Guts' Rage

"Simple but fun to play."

Sword of the Berserk: Gut’s Rage is a traditional gore fest with high quality graphics and realistic voice acting. The game is pretty simple to play. You hack mutilated humans to pieces, watch some long cutscenes then continue with the hacking until you complete the game. There are no puzzles to solve just pure violence. You play the role of Guts on a mission to cure your ill companion a young girl called Katska. You soon get into a fight with a mandragora, which is a type of infected human.

Graphics: 8/10
For a Dreamcast game things are looking good as soon as you press power. You will see some of the edges of objects are flat and not smooth but that is the only real niggle. Everything you see on screen is high resolution and there are no jaggies at all. The characters are animated well and have a realistic look, they move well and the fight movements have really been worked on. The graphics are good enough to use in all the cutscenes, this makes the game more believable and saves space on the disk. Some people might get bored with the cutscenes because there are simply loads to view. You can always skip them the second time around.

Sound: 6/10
Not the strongest point of the game, but it doesn’t need to be when you are concentrating on not getting yourself killed. There are some tracks played during the cutscenes and whilst playing but they don’t play a large role in the experience. The effects for your weapon and the damage you do are nicely done. Try hitting your sword into a stonewall and the sound produced would be just like the real thing.

Gameplay: 9/10
Thankfully the game is not too hard to complete, the learning curve goes up slowly as you progress allowing you to ease yourself into the style of the game. The lack of save points can be annoying. You have to fight your way through hordes of enemies before you can save, plus there are only a few points in the game. If you do badly then you just have to continue because it would be a long way back to the last point. Some levels are harder than others earlier on but after a few attempts you can progress through the levels without much trouble. Your standard weapon is a massive sword, which is about as long as you are high. With this sword you can slice through groups of enemies. Especially fun is when you go berserk, this happens when you have taken enough damage from enemies for Guts to go mental on his foes. The screen turns a red tint, now you can run around taking no damage and dishing out much more pain than you usually could, unfortunately this mode doesn’t last long.

Overall: 8/10
A surprisingly good game, you can easily pick it up and play, or leave it and come back later. The graphics are a lot better than your average Dreamcast game and the whole piece is well polished.

Rent or Buy?
Buy it, you won’t be able to rent because shops such as Blockbuster don’t stock Dreamcast games any more, anyway you can pick it up for a couple of quid here in the UK so it is worth it even if you don’t like these kinds of game.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/04/02, Updated 12/04/02