The Bouncer

"The root of all gaming evil."

Possibly the biggest wart on the ass of gaming ever conceived. (i.e. Square’s worst game)

Gameplay: Well, if it isn’t the Bouncer, you’ve probably heard of it. And believe me, its probably as bad as you’ve heard. The game at its core is normal beat’em up. Guide your character through levels, fighting through really dumb enemies as you progress to the end of the level to fight a buffed up Boss type character. Because of the simplistic nature of the genre, there has been a long line of these types of games, many of them considered classics; Double Dragon, Streets of Rage, Final Fight. The only ‘classic’ category The Bounce belongs to is that of Videogames Greatest Follies.
Lets start off with the positive: the game controls well enough, movement is responsive and it’s really easy to get into this game and get started. The game also utilizes a neat experience system, where when you defeat opponents, you get Bouncer Points (cleaver, huh?); you can then assign these points to different stats, or buy new moves for your character. To fully upgrade your character, you do need to play through the game several times. Also, there are three different Bouncers to play as, so you could be playing this game for quite a while. If it wasn’t so flawed.
To start with, the game mechanics have some glaring flaws. The pacing of the game is just awful. A lot of times, you end up picking your Bouncer, then going off and fighting 3 enemies, and watching a cut scene. It gets incredibly boring, and you feel like your watching more than your playing. There seriously must be at least a 2:1 ratio of cut scenes to gameplay. And when you’re not watching them, you’re trying to skip through them, which is an unnecessary burden. This gameplay score would have probably went up 3 points had they made this more like a traditional beat’em up (i.e. clear levels, lots and lots of enemies).
Another large core problem is with the Bouncer points. Many of the stages have you playing with the other two selectable bouncers as support, but often times they end up just getting in your way. The AI is pathetically stupid, and as a result die far too sooner than they should. The largest problem I have, however is with the experience system. You kill an enemy and your Bouncer gets experience. However, if your Retard Intelligence buddy gets the kill, he gets no experience. So in that case, its almost better that they die so fast, because other wise you have to race to the kill, or precious experience is wasted.
Those are two massive, obvious flaws to the structure of the game, but we aren’t done there. The developers tried to add in some elements that would set this game aside from traditional beat’em ups, and boy did they succeed (or failed…?). They tried to add in a free roaming environment in some levels. It lets your character roam freely when not fighting enemies. Basically, you’re running down bland corridors trying to find the next three enemies to fight. Other times you end up trying to avoid doors that come down from the ceiling, and possess no challenge however.
The Coup de Gras comes in the ‘infiltration’ level, where you have to sneak into the enemy building using a sequence of hand motions to cover your disguise. It's just a plain game of mimicking. The bad guy will do a motion, and you just press a button to mimic him. The guy, seeing that you know the ‘code’ lets you by, thinking you’re a fellow baddie. I’m not sure if they were trying to make this serious, or a mock comedy of stealth games. I do know its plain sickening. I’ve got a very good sense of humor, and usually can find black comedy in almost anything; but this was just plain awful.
Back to the ‘real’ game now; it’s tremendously unbalanced. Once you unlock a move, there is nothing to stop you from using that same move repeatedly. In one level, I remember, I just used the same move over and over because there was no limiting factor of it (like Streets of Rage).
Oh, and the boss’ can be insanely frustrating. It seems like they can instantly launch an attack right out from a blocked motion, even if your in the process of attacking them. PLUS there is no Continue screen after you die. You get ejected to the main menu, and then have to load your game and skip multiple cutscenes to get back to your old spot. On one boss I kept getting killed by, it took 57 seconds (yes, I counted) to get back to fighting him. That is just unacceptable. Did I mention that there is no two-player support in the normal game? Or how about the fact that you can’t use weapons?
In all honesty, I didn’t really pay attention to the story. I don’t feel that a story is real integral to this type of game, and moreover, I doubt that it would have added anything to this score. Even if this story had Hemingway depth, it wouldn’t make a difference for the piss poor gameplay.
Overall, this horror of this game cannot possibly be measured. For the time I put into this game, it's easily the worst I’ve ever played. It felt like I was doing more watching than playing, and I find the fact that anyone would consider putting more FMV than actual substance into a game completely revolting; it defies the whole concept of videogames: enjoyable gameplay. A lot of people bitch about the length of this game, but I don’t have a problem with it. If this game was any longer, I might have done something very rash to my PS2.

Final: 3.4

Graphics: The graphics themselves are very nice; nice looking character models with great textures on both the characters and the backgrounds. Cool little effects like motion blur add some great effects to this game. Everything has a nice shiny look to it, running at a smooth frame-rate. Also, the cut-scenes themselves are top notch (it is Squaresoft…). Load times are average at best, however, because of all the cut scene skipping.

Final: 9.1

Sound: The sound in this game is decent, but give the guys props for putting in 5.1 sound during the cut scenes (especially because there’s so many of them…); it is a first for a console game (or any game, maybe). Combat music is OK, but it’s easily forgotten by the bad, repetitive grunts of the Bouncers. Voice acting is decent at best, nothing really spectacular, but nothing Capcom’ish. However, if I have to hear that over-zealous announcer proclaim “The Bouncer” one more time, I swear I’m going to smash my speakers. It seriously made me put in a CD; that’s how annoying it gets. Overall, nothing truly outstanding about the sound, but the 5.1 output is a very cool addition.

Final: 7.8

Worth Mentioning: I’m guessing that the ratio of Cut Scenes to gameplay is at least 2:1. It’s probably more, but I didn’t have the patience to sit through it all. To stay professional, I took away the maximum .1 points on the tilt; otherwise the game would have ended up with a negative score. I think I could write a term paper on the problems with this game.

Worth buying: Don’t let the graphics or tricky box art cajole you; this game sucks big time. In a traditionally short, boring group of games, the Bouncer is a mockery of all that is holy. If you like beat’em up’s there are so many other games I’d rank ahead of this. Streets of Rage 1-3, Dynamite Cop, Final Fight, Die Hard Arcade: All are better than the Bouncer because they don’t try to hide their true nature behind a wash of cut scenes, bland story telling, and “RPG elements”. I’d rather choke on my own vomit than be subjected to this game again.

Reviewer Tilt: -.10

Final Score: 5.89

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 04/19/01, Updated 04/19/01