Dead or Alive

"Babes vs. Gameplay"

The ''breast-game'' tried to grab its part of the PlayStation-Beat´em up-cake, being in the hands of the Tekken series and Soul Blade. Dead or alive managed it and is now a fixed greatness with its sequels on the PS2 and the XBOX. Now here we go:

Graphics: 7

Characters: 8
Mostly the characters are not very original. You always think about having seen them before in another game. The wrestler, the babe, the soldier,....o.k. but they all have their characteristic moves, and fighting style. All of the fighters, especially the female ones are very well designed and animated. A great thing is the movement of the characters when they are doing nothing. As soon as you don´t press any button they switch into a ''stand-by-mode'' and are moving very cool, waving their arms and stuff like that. Especially these animations are quite smooth. During the fight, everything is quite fast, so there´s nothing left from the smooth movements. But hey, the game is fast. Quite a bunch of beat´em ups are too slow on the PS. Here you have a tempo that´s acceptable. Anyway, the graphics do not reach the quality of the arcade-version, but for PS relations it´s o.k.
Stage design: 5
The stages are very simple. There´s not one animation in the background, and the graphics are nice but in my opinion too simple. Even the backgrounds of Tekken 1 are more impressive compared to this one. The only stage I really like is Ayanes, but it´s nothing special either.

Sound: 7

Music: 6
Nothing special here. Each stage has its tune, but they are all neither very spectacular nor annoying.
SFX: 8
Each of the characters has a huge amount of different thing to say/scream. It´s fun to go to the Sound-test in the options menu for testing every sound. Also the other effects like punches, kicks, breaking bones, and the ''danger zone'' explosions are well done.

Gameplay: 6

There are three different modes in DoA, but the only playable one is the simple arcade mode. Or do you want to fight 30/50/100 fights in row in order to get 100% of wins. In the arcade mode you have to beat all of the other characters, if you were quick enough you will fight Ayane, and at last the boss Raidou. The clou of DoA is that you don´t get an end sequence for each character, but a new option every time you beat the game, or a new costume. The options are only such important things like ''Bouncing breasts'' ON/OFF or the adjustment of the so called ''Danger Zone'', that surrounds the normal battlefield, and which will kick your ass when you kiss the ground outside the battlefield. But there´s a huge amount of different costumes, especially of the babes (15 !). That´s all very cool, but the way you win the game is not that cool. Actually each character has only 3 useful combos you´ll use always to beat the game. The other combos are great, but impossible to use in those quick fights. But you don´t even need to know a combo. Having only two ways of attack (hand/food) and no way to defend apart from the Hold-option you can simply bash your way to Raidou. But that´s possibly the case for many Beat´em ups.

Presentation: 6

Already the intro is not really good, focussing only on the three babes. Then the missing end-sequence, and even the lack of any interesting information about the characters is also not very useful for liking this game. The menus are well designed but nothing special. A plus is the cool training mode where you can learn all of the combos of each character, although you´ll never use 85% of them in the game itself.

Final Score: 7

After all, this is a good Beat´em up but no highlight. Some cool ideas (danger zone, many costumes, bouncing breasts) mixed together with the traditional parts (stereotype fighters, the classic arcade mode) but a very rough presentation. Play the Arcade!

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 08/15/02, Updated 08/15/02