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Dom Robinson reviews
Sony
- Price: £39.99
- Players: 1-4
The Bounceris billed as the PS2’s first game containing Dolby Digital 5.1 sound andfull use of the pressure-sensitive analogue pad while you fight, but it’s anintensively depressing experience.
Let’s start with the plot. A young girl called Dominique has been kidnappedand your trio of bouncers – Sion, Volt & Kou – have to save her.That’s it.
Remember the old arcade and ZX Spectrum beat-em-up Target: Renegade?It’s like that but in 3D and without the ability to pick up items around youwith which to batter your opponent.
There are three ways to play the game:
- Survival Mode: Fight horde after horde of enemies.
- Versus Mode: up to four players using a PS2 multi-tap
- Story Mode: Same as ‘survival’ but with pointless FMV sequencesthat you’ll want to skip time and time again(!)
The graphics are blurry most of the time making it nigh-on impossible to getany sense of involvement out of it and the sound is standard kick-punchnonsense. As I said before, it’s the first PS2 game to contain Dolby Digital5.1 sound, but this only occurs during a handful of FMV sequences – and notto particularly great effect at that either – while the rest of the game missesout on a great opportunity.
Playing the game itself isn’t the greatest of experiences. It states that themore you press the analogue buttons the harder the kick-punch delivered to thebad guys, but it’s more like it doesn’t matter how hard you press, you eitherkick the shit out of them or they do the same to you. According to the pressblurb, each of the characters can learn up to seven or eight unique moves asthe game progresses, but they still just deliver the same old same old.
It’s all been done before and so much better at other times too.
There’s a nice moment when the train station explodes, but overall you’ll getmore excitement by setting the vibration to ‘on’, getting into a heavy fightand stuffing the controller down your pants.
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
PLAYABILITY
ORIGINALITY
ENJOYMENT
0
OVERALL
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.