Spikeout: Battle Street

"The natural successor to Final Fight....Get Real!!!!"

Spikeout:Battle Street. Possibly the most hyped up average game ever. You think it's going to be final fight on your xbox, but prepare to be shocked and upset.

For some reason this game lacks some gripping magic, something that the original Final fight games was full of. It's the same in every aspect of the game. None of it is particularly bad but it just isn't great. The game itself is quite good fun...for about 3 minutes and then you ask yourself the question "Why am I playing this?". You suddenly realise that that revision you put off just seems that little bit more appetising.

The game starts off well with a good bit of butt-kicking but then descends into total chaos when 3 different bosses appear that can spin around and knock off half your health in about three seconds. If you find the game too hard on normal difficulty, which I did, you travel to the options menu and then realise that you can't make the game easier, you can only make it harder. After dying several times on the ridiculously hard default difficulty settings the game announces that because you are so rubbish and are completely incapable, you can change the difficulty to easy. Horray, you might think, but no!

When I changed the difficulty I found that even though the game was a tad easier, the AI stands right in front of you and pretends to box without any punching or kicking or any other kind of physical attack. I think that the AI believes that it can kill you with it's breath. Unlikely, but hey? Now that you can actually complete a level you then fall victim to the dreaded loading screen, I mean cut scene. It's alright for a game to entertain you with a cut scene whilst loading the main level, but with a story that must have been written by Hollyoaks' 2nd script writers blind dog, you find yourself staring out of the window and watching the blades of grass slowly appear, the seasons change and then finally the game loads. Maybe, if the game didn't use so much processor power playing the cutscene then you might actually be able to play the game in a short period of time.

Overall, this game was obviously designed by Sega to tick all of the boxes on a marketing experts form rather than designed because one man wanted to make a great game and for that reason I would recommend that you play this game, briefly and then play it online where the fun really starts, if you can ever get the level to load.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 01/02/07