Review

Street culture is starting to make our gaming life unbearable. Everywhere you look there’s another title overloaded with attitude and a rap soundtrack waiting for our attention. Unfortunately this trend shows no sign of ending as these titles top the charts all over the world regardless of quality. So, will Namco succeed where fellow big hitters Capcom and Konami so spectacularly failed?

Fortunately for us, Namco are past masters at the fighting game so this is brimming with the sort of quality you’d expect from the developers of Tekken and Soul Calibur. However, unlike those titles where the bouts were strictly one-on-one you can regularly find yourself outnumbered and backed into a corner.

The bulk of the game is Story driven where you take on the roll of a brawler called Brad Hawk. Initial impressions of him aren’t good, as he appears to have stolen Steven Seagal’s wardrobe! Thankfully after a couple of quick fights you realise that it’s only his appearance that he has in common with martial arts cinema’s answer to Pat Butcher.

As expected the plot is as flimsy as they come (something about a kidnapping) and serves merely as a way of linking one fight to the next, but where other titles failed was in forcing the player to run around empty streets for ages looking for the next brawl. Here you simply select the next mission from the map screen and after a brief loading pause find yourself thrown straight into the action. This approach keeps the action coming thick and fast and also means there are no unwanted distractions.

The fighting itself is kept simple, at least in principle, and flows brilliantly even as you start to learn more. Considering there’s only really one attack button there’s a surprising amount of moves on offer. As things start to get more intense you can select a second character to fight alongside and both these and the enemies show a decent level of intelligence compared to your average fighting game. Unfortunately, this makes things extremely difficult too soon and at times it makes for an incredibly frustrating experience.

You can at least console yourself with the multiplayer options should this all become too much. With over 60 playable characters to unlock and up to four players available in local play this is more in-depth than most but not really deep enough.

Ultimately Urban Reign is a good title worthy of your attention and for my money it just shades it over The Warriors. It’s fast, smooth and playable with plenty of options to keep you returning to it but it lacks that special something to make it great.

About the Review

Platform

Sony Playstation 2

Developer

Namco

Publisher

Namco

Released

9th February 2006