Maximo: Ghosts to Glory

"Capcom, you can do better than this"

I played the old Ghouls and Ghosts, and while I remember it being fun at times, I also remember incidents of cheapness and annoyingness. Overall though, I always felt they were good games. I had a bad feeling in my bones when I rented this, but I said, Hey! It's a Capcom game, how bad can it suck? I've heard a lot about it! It must be good. Man, I drank the Kool-aid, bought the hype, and rented this game as soon as possible. Can we say mistake?

Graphics-(5/10) Sure it looks good. Every Playstation 2 game for the most part looks good. If the gameplay is going to be horrid, more on that later, then the game better look gorgeous and sadly this game is not gorgeous.

Sound-(5/10) Again, there are some nice sound effects but nothing spectacular and the music is non-de script to the point I can't remember what it sounds like as I write this. Ya'd have thought with all the time they didn't spend on the gameplay they'd have had time to create some good music, but newp.

Control-(5/10) It's not that the control is really bad, but the gameplay is so god awful that it makes it hard not to look down on the other aspects of the game

Gameplay-(1/10) And believe me, I'd give it a negative score if I could. Where to start....hrm how about the camera. Hrm, if you can't see half of what you need to play the game, does that really constitute a camera? But wait! There's a centering function that takes eons to respond and improves your vision approximately .1%. I lost count how many times I got blindsided by the repetitive and boring monsters. Then to make matters worse, there are truly obnoxious jumps in this game, with absolutely no forgiveness whatsoever. You miss it by a micron and into the death (lava or whatever) you go. I don't like obnoxious jumps to begin with, but obnoxious jumps when you can't see what you're jumping to? Forget about it. Ok, so you're getting blindsided, dying to obnoxious jumps, but wait, there's more! We wouldn't want you to be able to save convienently since we made this game harder than Hades already. Collect those 100 coins and have them ready for those rare occasions you actually do get to save. Be sure to beat several annoying and not fun at all levels in order to do it too. And by all means, I hope you like seeing that opening movie cause you WILL be seeing it a lot.

Conclusion- Mathematically I think the rating works out to a 4, but taking into consideration the horrible gameplay curve, it gets a 3 and that's being generous. When will they learn that a good looking game that plays like absolute garbage is worthless? Avoid this turkey at all costs, I wish I had.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 01/25/02, Updated 01/25/02