Rise to Honor

"Motion capture stinks!"

Rise to Honor is a big budget title from the folks at SCEA. In an attempt to trump Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon, Sony sought a partnership with another martial arts cinema master. Luckily, this collaboration has yielded a much better game than the aforementioned X-Box title. With assistance from Hong Kong superstar Jet Li, the developers were able to use motion capture for all of the in game animations. This is not a good thing. Can one flaw destroy an entire game? When that one flaw is the games most important feature, yes.
In essence, Rise to Honor is intended to be the modern equivalent to the brawlers of yesteryear. From the incredible Final Fight, to the less than stellar Rival Turf, these bad guy bashing extravaganzas ruled the industry in the early nineties but have recently become an endangered species due to shifting market trends and biased video game reviewers. Nevertheless, Rise to Honor has plenty of brawling but the combat is flat out annoying some times. All of the games animations are motion captured for the utmost realism in movement. This may sound sweet to a casual observer but as any deep action gamer knows, motion capture cuts down on control. The most important elements of any action game are collision detection and visibility. This games reliance on motion capture causes constant annoyance. For instance, you will be punching and kicking through a goons body, but your attacks pass harmlessly through him because he is doing an animation that might look like he were dodging if he
were about two feet further away. Also, any time an enemy successfully attacks you, your character seems to purposefully move into the attack. This is all a result of the collision being dictated by actors who performed these moves on a stage over a year ago. Unrealistic motion in video game characters grants the user a great sense of control. Motion Capture should be relegated to the world of cutscenes and switch pulling animations. Sometimes while fighting, the game will show a close up of a devastating move in slow motion. This is completely disorienting and causes you to be unfairly smacked around simply because you weren't permitted to see. You can actually get run over by motorcycles while the game is showing a mini cutscene. The highlight of the game is certain sequences where you are granted guns with unlimited ammo and proceed to mow down baddies in a way that will be thrilling to any fan of Smash TV. Unfortunately, the games cutscenes are in the way.
Action games are best when they feature a hilariously bad story. Rise to Honors story, however, is just plain bad. The plot makes no sense whatsoever and will only entertain those who think Van Helsing is a cinematic masterpiece. The worst part of the story is that it constantly interrupts the gameplay. Every single time an enemy appears, the game highlights this by showing him cracking his neck and acting tough. This will drive you nuts quite quickly. Then there's the magic R1 Let's say for instance that you need to climb a box. Well walk up to the box and press R1. Voila! You've climbed it. The R1 button is your ticket to doing anything in this game from jumping over motorcycles to bouncing off of walls. Any fan of interactivity will hate this game. Any casual game player with no skills will love it.
The music and sound effects are nothing to write home about. The environments are quite impressive though. Each stage looks just like a real world environment and is fully rendered in 3D with all the little imperfections that reality features. Such as, scattered litter, decaying wood, and empty bottles resting near ashtrays. The backgrounds are truly an eye candy buffet.
Beating this game will take almost three hours on your first try. Even with an included hard mode, a second play through is unlikely. You simply will not want to suffer the story again, some cutscenes can not be skipped, and the only difference in hard mode is that you take extra damage. Seeing as how all of the games challenge comes from bad design, you probably won't be interested in jacking up the difficulty.
As a guy who loves playing repetitious action games unlimited times, I don't think I'll ever look in this games direction again. Like the blockbusters it attempts to emulate, Rise to Honor is a shallow excursion into combat which will leave you unsatisfied and cranky. With the story removed and two player co-op added, Rise to Honor could have been a contender. As it stands, we're looking at a game that is mediocre across the board. It's hard to recommend this as a brawler when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu are both available for PS2. And if you want to play a Hong Kong action film, Dead to Rights and Max Payne are available. Action fans and people who are bad at video games should rent it, beat it and immediately free up the 68 KB it wastes on your memory card. Everyone else should just stay away.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 06/07/04