Danger Girl

"DANGER! Average game coming!"

Luscious lovelies, toting guns and whips; cavorting around in next to nothing, getting wet at every opportunity and flaunting their womanly assets like they were going out of fashion. Surely there isn’t a market for such entertainment? - Hmm. Well men, boys and some women, we’re sure, will be pleased to know that the Danger Girls are heaving their chests on to the PlayStation this November, hoping to prove that there’s more to them than meets the eye!

Danger Girl is based on the DC comics’ cliffhanger series, created by J Scott Campbell and Andy Hartnell. It follows the adventures of an all-female espionage team: Abbey Chase, Sydney Savage and newest recruit JC. Backed by their operations team, namely Deuce, a former British Secret Agent and Valerie, a communications specialist, the girls must fight the evil Major Maxim and bring down his fascist Hammer Empire - all without breaking a nail!

You play as each of the three girls over 12 individually titled levels ranging from JC in Rigged to Blow and Frozen Assets, to Sydney Savage in Caution: Curves Ahead! The objectives you have to complete for each section of the game are revealed to you by Deuce as you play through them and include missions to blow up enemy supplies, defeating hordes of enemy soldiers along the way with Sydney getting pretty handy with her whip! Danger Girl is a third-person adventure, where the emphasis is very much on the girls’ ample backsides! The landscapes and scenery is interactive and you’re able to open boxes, shoot out lights - to confuse the enemy by sneaking around in your night vision goggles - and open doors and other equipment by finding the relevant items to activate them.

Weaponry available to the girls is immense and surprisingly effective for a game where other aspects are weaker than you would hope. You begin the game with a Desert Eagle Pistol, which is a great little gun in its own right, and progress through a list of heavier fire-arms, including box standard, Sub and heavy machine guns. Grenade launchers and Rocket launchers are available and some of the more unusual weapons include Pipe Bombs, Noise makers, Dart Guns and, of course, Sydney’s whip.

Although the actual level design of the game is great and the range of missions diverse, Danger Girl is missing the electricity that singles out the great games from the rest of the pack. Controlling your Danger Girl is cumbersome and awkward and is emphasised by the lack of grace or stealth any of them seem to possess. If you want to swing round quickly or in fact do anything with some kind of pace, you’ve had it. The girls are great if they’re running in a straight line, but anything else seems very difficult for them to master.

The animated movies of the Danger Girls and the beautiful stills that act as loading screens are full of movement; portraying the curves and womanly assets of the women so well. Unfortunately, this is lost during the actual game. The technology used makes it difficult to portray them in their original goddess like state, and the premise of the game - that as well as being incredible spies you are god’s gift to men - is lost as your characters move awkwardly around.

Graphically the game could have done with more to improve the smoothness of the textures used. The scenery looks blocky, as do the girls and, by far, the most quality moments visually are the opening movies and the levels where you can shoot out the lights and use your night vision goggles.

It’s a real shame that these things couldn’t have been put right for the Danger Girls, because the other aspects to the game like great characters, interesting objectives and strong storyline are all present and correct. Danger Girl may be some people’s, sorry, men’s dream game, but as it stands, once the titillation has become boring there’s not much else to keep you gripped!

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 10/16/01, Updated 10/16/01