Dead or Alive Xtreme 2

"It's Relaxing To Watch Someone Else Play It, But Frustrating To Actually Play Yourself"

I never played the original for this spin off of the DOA series, and probably never will be able to until Microsoft create support for it on the 360. Thus I can't really comment on how successful a sequel it is, and thus I'll concentrate on how good it is a game in it's own right.

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Storyline (5/10)
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Nothing amazing, in fact the storyline here takes a complete backseat to the gameplay, which in a was is refreshing. Many companies seem to take their games and put a quick and nasty story on top of their wonderful new game engine just to give us an excuse to play it. This game seems to realise there's no point trying to put a clever storyline into the game, because quite frankly, there's no need. It serves it's purpose and at least gives us an excuse for why the girls are on the island.

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Gameplay (5/10)
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When you get to the island, you can choose whether to have a quick tour to show you what you can do. While helpful, the pace is extremely slow, and thus I quickly lost interest in what the tutorial had to say. Basically, you can choose an area you want to visit three times per day and then once you've finished your third activity you are sent to your hotel room.

The activities are quite varied; I found the actual volleyball section incredibly difficult as either the AI was outright stupid and didn't even move, to stupidly hard where I was losing match after match 7-1. I have to say this made me lose all interest in this aspect of the game, as losing time after time wasn't a really appealing use of my time. The jetskis were fun for a while, however, after a certain amount of plays, you're sent to a new set of tracks, and then after even more playing you're given another set. My main complaint is that you couldn't choose which tracks you did, the first few are stupidly easy, but then they get impossibly hard, and I hate the fact you have to play a good portion of the course blind as the waves completely obscure the screen. Thus I lost interest in this as I kept going outside the course and being disqualified due to not being able to return to the course within 5 seconds. This meant that two of my sources of income were gone.

The pool hopping game has a certain charm to it, however, the difference in whether you do a long jump or a short hop is down to how long you hold the button down for. I had problems with this has even if I only lightly tapped the button, I constantly found my girl doing long jumps, and thus often lost. It's a shame as these are the attractions that are supposed to make the game fun and essentially get you through the day to night at your hotel. However, I just found them extremely frustrating and not much fun. This left me with the casino as my only viable source of income, and I sucked with it just about as much as I suck in real life with casinos, so perhaps it could be considered they've fully captured casinos.

The main aspect of the game is the collection aspect, however you're not really given any in game tutorial on how to accomplish this. It was through pure guess work that I found out you needed to put things into the collection in order to carry them through to subsequent vacations. While it is kind of fun in a way to get all the swimsuits, and view the girls in them, it's a sheer chore to collect all the irrelevant accessories items in the game and it's even more of a pain to make ‘friends' with the girls as there's no tutorial on how to make them like you.

Overall, on the outside it's a good game, but there's a big lack of content in as far as things to do. The content that is there is also incredibly dull after a while, and I can understand that the collecting is the focus of the game, but the amount of effort you have to put in to get, what are to be honest crappy suits, just isn't justified by the reward you receive.

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Graphics (8/10)
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The girls look fine, in fact the only major problem is the hair, which in places looks awful. The gravure scenes where basically you watch the girls play about or ‘relax' are done alright, and have a filter placed above them to blur them out slightly by the looks of it so they look a little more ‘natural' and less like a bunch of polygons.

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Sounds (5/10)
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The voice acting for the girls is fine for the sound effects like the grunts etc. but the actual speaking parts are so annoying! Some of the things they say also don't make sense or are never explained, such as Leifang going to her hotel every night and saying “What happened to the trash can?”. It becomes very irritating very quickly. The choice of music is also extremely grating, and the cheesy pop songs that are supposed to be 'relaxing' just make me put my own music on over it. Not something a game should really make you want to do.

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Summary (5/10)
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It's not a terrible effort, but it feels like a load of sub games shoved together and don't really fit that well, other than them all sharing the beach theme. It doesn't have a lot of differing content to keep you interested for any long period of time, and to be honest, while the graphics are good and it's fun to put the girls in all the outfits, it's not all that a game should consist of.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 03/12/07