Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance

Beatdown is a game that wants you to hate it. No it wants you to $*&%ing hate it. The horrendous camera, copy and paste looking NPC, its offensively over use of the $*&%ing F-word, to overly redundant side-mission; One can not help but think that this game is $*%&ing with you. Well if you don't flick the bird at your T.V and shiv the game in the back you may be surprised to learn that in two to three hours that you may, possibly, actually, somewhat, like it.

Beatdown is a beat'em up. From the offset you can chose one of the five playable characters Raven, Jason G, Lola, Gina and Aaron. All of whom need to do some mindless beat downing of the NPC characters in a quest to get answers as to who set them up against there old gang. Like most games with multiple playable characters the games story is abysmal, and is actual painful to sit through due to the unbearable script which consists of lines such as “ *^% ” and who can forget “You $@#^t piece of #*&%^ ” and my personal favorite "I've taken $*#! that look better than you". Throw in an abysmal Scottish accent and a 30 second looping sound track and you have a excellent contender for all time worst presentaion in a video game award.

Now if the presentation wasn't enough to scare you away in the first five minutes you will now have to contend with a truly demonic camera and a extremely poor auto lock-on feature. The poor camera is more than a headache, it's down right nauseating, you will constantly have to try and adjust it to see your enemies making it very difficult to pull off combos and other moves. The auto lock doesn't work well either. There will be times when you will automatically lock onto some grunt, but in fact you wanted to attack the guy who is lifting the crowbar over your head and is readying to smear your brains across the floor. But for all its faults the combat somehow still manages to be fun.

This is a case when sheer quantity makes up for sub-par quality. There are loads of moves to learn to decimate your opponents, clothes to buy in order to disguises your self and avoid enemy encounters, and tons of people to recruit into your newly formed gang. There's even a level up system. All these features together actually make the game enjoyable enough for multiple playthroughs. It 's really surprising how many RPG elements are in this game and the overall package is greatly improved because it.

In the end of the day Beatdown is a game that @#*#'s with you a lot, yet still manages to be enjoyable. So if your a glutton for punishment and some mindless violence you may actually like this game, though I'm doubtful that anyone can ever admittedly love it.