Lawrence.com

Namco and Capcom are two of Japan's biggest game developers, and their history spans numerous genres. They've both made fighters, adventure games, and plenty of arcade classics. With their releases last month, it appears that they're both trying to enter the fruitful genre of "highly disappointing beat-em-ups". Capcom's Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance was a game that tried to do too much and failed. Namco's Urban Reign tries to do absolutely nothing new, and somehow manages to fail at that.

While Beat Down wanted to add RPG elements, gang recruitment, and a disguise system into the mix, Urban Reign is more than content to just throw 100 nearly identical missions at unfortunate gamers. It's important to note that the large majority of these missions can be completed in under one minute. You do the math to figure out how short the game is.

Almost every one of the missions follows the exact same formula. Your character Brad Hawk is in a square/rectangle room with 1-4 generic thugs. Spend about 40 seconds beating them up, and you're done. Every once in a while, criteria will be added such as "Defeat the enemy within the time limit", or "Bang up Jake's lower body".

The fighting engine itself is certainly flawed, but it becomes more manageable as you unlock more moves. You start the game with basic circle and triangle attacks. Circle is "regional attack", meaning you press the analog stick in a certain direction to hit that specific part of the body. If you want to hit the guy directly in the head for the whole fight to wear him down, you can. Triangle performs grapples, and these are usually pro wrestling-style moves like backbreakers, pile drivers, and choke slams. Hitting triangle and circle together performs a special attack, and this is the best approach for wearing enemies down. As you progress through the 'missions', you'll unlock more of these attacks, most of which are very useful.

Urban Reign's biggest gameplay flaw lies in defense. Square is supposed to evade, but once an enemy has you in the middle of a combo, it's not unlikely that he's going to hit you about 25 times in a row. If you start getting juggled, you might as well just set your controller down, because it's going to be a while. Some boss missions are nearly impossible because of this, even on the easiest of the five difficulty levels. The difficulty in general is extremely lopsided, because most missions are a cakewalk on Normal, and then there are the boss fights that will take you dozens of times to beat even on Very Easy.

Most gamers will probably get frustrated and quit Urban Reign within the first 30 missions. It's too bad, because the game actually does get significantly better with the addition of the AI partner. In later missions, you can choose who will fight alongside Brad, and they have many different abilities during battle. Holding R2 and pressing a face button will perform a variety of functions. You can call for a double-team attack, call for help, or even switch playable characters so you're controlling the partner.

It's too bad a second player can't join in during the Story missions, but Urban Reign does include a versus mode. There's really not much to do, other than run around with your selected weapon and beat the crap out of a friend. The whole mode almost seems like an afterthought, and it's really not worth playing more than two or three times (even with 60 selectable characters).

Graphically, Urban Reign is pretty much exactly what you'd expect a Namco beat-em-up to look like. Character models are decent, and the animation is smooth. For some reason, Namco seems to think that lightning comes out of your body when you get punched or kicked, so expect to see a lot of that. The in-game music is fairly generic cheese-rock (think Dynasty Warriors), but it works for the game.

If you have the patience to make it to the AI partner, Urban Reign becomes playable. It's just too bad that the story missions are set up the way they are, because the fragmented nature really takes away from the game. It would be so much better if it had larger levels to explore (like Streets of Rage, Final Fight, etc), even if they were linear. 10 large linear levels that were filled with enemies would be far better than 100 short missions with 3 enemies. There's plenty to unlock (including some familiar Tekken faces), but I highly doubt most gamers will want to spend too much time with Urban Reign.

Graphics: B-

Sound: C+

First Play: D

Last Play: C

Gameplay: C-

Overall: 70% C-