Urban Reign

The beat-em-up gets another mild revival thanks to Namco's street brawler. Verdict and some new videos.

	Version PS2	Developer Namco	Publisher Namco	Genre Action

By Joseph Jackson

Last year saw two major attempts at reviving the classic street beat-em-up genre, but Sega's mediocre SpikeOut: Battle Street and Capcom's abysmal Beatdown both unfortunately failing to live up to expectations, and frankly we're not holding out much hope for Final Fight: Streetwise either. Enter Namco with its take on the genre, Urban Reign.

Urban Reign's premise of gang violence in urban areas is hardly a new concept; the story takes place in Ragtown, Green Harbor, a city overrun by gang violence. After a member of Zaps, one of the city's baddest gangs, is kidnapped, all eyes turn to Chinatown's gang run by a young swordmaster named Shun Ying Lee. Lee has some unwanted attention and hires you, professional street brawler Brad Hawk, to lend a helping hand.

As players take to the streets and battle through the main story mode, they'll find the odds clearly stacked against them. In protecting your turf you'll fight through a variety of urban settings from streets into back alleys, junkyards, warehouses, bars, stores and the like.

The game controls decently enough, with a good range of offensive and defensive moves. On the offense, we have various melees and grapples for region-specific attacks, marked out with a gauge that highlights regional damage to enemy bodies. Meanwhile the defensive system allows players to dodge, counter and reverse attacks - something that becomes quite useful against some of the harder, more irritating enemies.

While you start off with just a handful of moves to get you by, additional moves become available - a few of them look pretty cool, with a dose of wrestling techniques thrown in like F-5, stunner, leg whip, running powerbomb and my personal favorite, a mid-air powerbomb that follows a powerful uppercut.

You can also use grapple dash attacks to smash enemies into walls and other objects. Some well animated martial arts moves even have you running up and flipping off of walls, performing diving grapple attacks, and taking two enemies out with one well-positioned technique, while quick swipes on downed opponents can prove useful in sampping that last bit of energy.

With some additional presses you can also use 'Special Arts' attacks to get you out of heavy situations or when facing bosses. As you might expect, the bar depletes as you use it and fills as you attack enemies with regular techniques - hardly a new dynamic but one that still works.

While the main story mode is unfortunately a single player affair, players have the option of teaming up with AI-controlled partners before starting certain missions. While the choices are pretty slim at first, additional AI-controlled partners are unlocked as you progress through the game. You can perform some pretty cool double-team moves with them, and you can interrupt your partner's attacks to call them over for some assistance. Another nice feature allows players to switch roles and take control of their AI partners in mid-play.

While Urban Reign is predominantly a hand-to-hand combat affair players can make use of over 30 types of weapons found throughout the environments. Along with the advantage of inflicting more damage, the use of weapons can also add additional weapon-specific moves.

The action moves at a pretty quick pace, and since each mission is pretty short - often inside small areas that take anywhere from a minute to complete - capable players can breeze through the entire game in about four hours. But that's not to say that Urban Reign is an easy game by any means.

Replenishing energy can be a test in itself; iften it's simply a matter of creating enough distance between you and the thugs in order to consume your recovery items without interruption while you're vulnerable.

While the game starts off easy enough, the challenge tends to skyrocket during some of the boss battles, especially the ones where you're battling more than one boss character at the same time. At times, some of the bosses are simply an exercise in frustration if you're not into the habit of dodging, counter-striking, and reversing attacks. And even then, a handful of the bosses can be pretty darn tough since your strikes and counters aren't as effective on them as they are on lower level enemies.

While challenging, these are the types of battles that not only test player skill but also showcase the game's fighting engine with some great-looking fight scenes - you and the bosses going at it full bore, attempting to counter each other's moves at every turn. Just uh, good luck with the final two missions! You're going to need it.

While the general gameplay is pretty simplistic, some of the missions tend to mix things up a bit by adding specific objectives that need to be satisfied to progress. Stuff like damaging a specific region of an enemy's body, beating up a group of enemies within a set time limit, and defeating a certain gang member within a group are among some of the tasks you'll have, while building a stronger fighter using 'skill points' along the way is also advisable.

Despite the lack of a 2-player coop feature in the main story mode, Urban Reign's multiplayer mode supports up to 4-players via the PS2 multi-tap, with over 60 characters to choose from. Players also have a variety of multiplayer options including weapon battles, standard 1-4 player battles, two-on-two and so on, often with players scrambling to guard their objects while trying to destroy opponents. Additional play modes such as Free mode and Challenge mode can also be unlocked after completing all 100 missions.

From a visual standpoint, Urban Reign sports some pretty solid graphics with a nice variety of well-designed, moderately interactive, yet typical and generic environments to bash enemy skulls into. The character designs are pretty solid, with decent detail, fluid animation and brisk 60fps fluency, with an expected-these-days helping of both widescreen and progressive scan support.

The hard-edged soundtrack goes well with the action but it's very much on the forgettable side with no real memorable tunes, though fortunately it's nothing too annoying or distracting. A solid variety of sound effects is included.

Urban Reign is repetitive, but can be an entertaining, violent romp with thugs to beat up. The game takes familiar gameplay conventions and spruces things up with much tighter, challenging gameplay and surprisingly good looking . moves.

Namco's Tekken influence is here, with players able to juggle foes, and cameos from Paul Phoenix and Marshall Law. But it's hard not to imagine that things could still be a lot better if the designers of Tekken 5 put as much effort into this spin-off genre that has barely impoved since Streets of Rage.