Maximo: Ghosts to Glory

"The warrior in boxers has reurned better than ever!"

STORY: 4/10
Your Maximo, come home to your palace after you were off fighting somewhere. Lo and behold,
the main bad guy, Achilles is sitting there with your Queen, and has taken over your kingdom. He
then revives an army of the dead, and kills you. After that, your floating around in the
Underworld, Death appears to have a talk with you. He complains because Achilles is taking all
his souls and using them for his undead army. This would put Grim out of the job. So, he makes
a deal with you. He’ll bring you back to life to kill Achilles of you get him his souls. And so, the
quest begins...

GRAPHICS: 9/10
This games graphics are what you would expect from a PS 2. Very good, complete and solid.
Not once did I walk into a wall and have half my body sticking out the other end, if you know
what I mean. Everything that is metal is SHINY!!! Your helmet, sword, armor, you name it, it’s
shiny. The levels themselves are very colorful, but can be dark and gloomy when need-be.
GAMEPLAY: 10/10
First off, you have lives. You have 3 sets of bars, each with four hits. Every bar represents a
chunk of armor. You can heal a bar with potions. However, if you take four hits, a piece of
armor will pop off and you loose that health bar, and you cannot get it back unless you get
another piece of armor. The sheild also needs 10, 15, or 20 hits (depending on which shield you
have.) but this is rarely a problem, you get it back when you die, and it can be reparied easily.
You have these things called Nodes when you pause the screen. Here is where you store abilities.
Abilities are obtained by a few different ways, but the main way is killing things. Enemies will
drop abilities quite often. You can have up to infinite abilities, most of them are activated
automaticly. Anyway, back to the Nodes. You can place up to 3 abilities in these. When you
loose a life, all your abilities are lost except for those 3. The number of Nodes you get will
increase by 1 each time you kill a boss. This game does a good job of preventing you from
ignoring enemies. 1. There tough! Having a fleet of them chasing after you is not recommended!
2. They drop EVERYTHING! They drop stuff from gold, to potions, to keys, and abilities. You
can use gold to purchase many things, such as potions, more armor, and even Foot Cheese.(don’t
ask.) You can buy new boxers, but they are expensive and useless. They don’t affect you any,
you just look different. (My favorite is the cow boxers!) Jumps aren’t too much of a problem,
where as you can Double Jump, so they tend to be reasonably easy. However, it will tend to
make you very angry when you build yourself up with 4 pieces of armor and lots of abilities, just
to loose it all by falling down a hole.

CONTROL: 9/10
The Square button swings your sword, X lets you jump, and you can even double-jump, and then
if you push Square you will do a downward stab from the air. You can spin around in circles by
moving the control stick counter-clockwise and pressing Square. You have two types of attacks:
Swipe, and a Head Crush, which swoops from behind you to the front. I never had trouble with
the camera, whereas you can hit a button to focus it behind you.

DIFFICULTY: 7/10 (0 being the easiest, 10 being the hardest)
This game is hard! Enemies will often die fast, but attack you by the masses, so that makes them
hard. Some enemies, such as Skeleton Bombers (I HATE those guys!) are hard simply because
they are hard to hit without getting hurt. This game is difficult compared to many other games,
but it’s not THAT hard. You’ll get more than enough Death Tokens (Which give you continues)
than you’ll ever need. Lives are hidden all over. Bosses are easy... way, way too easy. They dies
fast and are easy to avoid.

LENGTH: 7/10:
This game isn’t horribly long, but for an action game it does take some time. Levels are big, and
there is a lot to do in them. Getting 100% Game Mastery would take forever. There are
unlockables, but not many and they arn’t much to rejoyce about. Another thing that makes the
game last is it’s difficulty, because you WILL die many times. When you die, you start from the
last check point, which are placed reasonably far from each other. Not two steps from where you
were, but not 100 miles away.

MUSIC: 9/10
The music is great, and each soundtrack has the familiar Ghost and Goblins chime to it, every now
and then. The music fits the levels, and is pretty cool.

RENT OR BUY:
Big time buy, this game has a lot to do on it, and it’s way to fun not to keep. You will find
yourself playing it again and again because it’s too fun to put down.

OVERALL: 9/10
Old schooled and tough... what more is there to ask for? The game is lengthy, there is a lot to it,
special abilities are awesome, and the music rocks.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 09/16/02, Updated 09/16/02