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WITH A TITLE LIKE Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball, you'd expect this game to take the sublime and simple game of beach volleyball and add fully automatic rocket launchers into the mix. You'd also expect that the take on the game would be extreme - in a way, the latter is partially right...
Welcome to Zack's island. In an intro that, perhaps, most of the good bits were lost in translation, it became "clear" that the main protaganist in our little game got suddenly wealthy thanks to a rather significant stroke of luck at a Casino back on the mainland. To celebrate being the wealthiest man on earth, he bought lots of stuff - including an enormous boat, rocket packs (let's face it, who wouldn't?) and a beautiful tropical island paradise. It is to this island that 8 characters (mostly from the Dead or Alive fighting series, part 4 of which is eagerly anticipated for release later this year - from the people that made this game...) have been invited to participate in a volleyball tournament and generally just hang out. Being the red blooded, all American (!) male that he is, the only people invited are women.
Instead of duking it out on the sand with explosives and knives, the game follows a more traditional bent - it's two-on-two, "don't let the ball hit the sand on your side of the net" volleyball. Kind of similar to tennis, only you are allowed to pass it to your partner and setup tricky moves. Very simple to understand, even someone that has never seen the game (in any form) before will very quickly come to grips with it. This ease of understanding is also aided by the simplicity of the controls - you have just two buttons with which to manipulate the ball, one of which passes to your partner while the other sends the ball over the net to your opponents side. Nice and simple.
These rather cleverly simple controls also have a considerable deal of complexity just beneath the surface - when you press the buttons and what you are doing with the stick can add to some very advanced techniques, which you will need when you face some of the tougher opponents. Fortunately you don't need to understand these techniques right from the start - you can get in and mix it up pretty much straight away, gaining skill as you play.
The ingame camera in DOAXBV is ludicrously poor. Without the ability to control or change it, the fact that it is so crap majorly impacts the game. It's almost as if the game designers had made it too simple to control and needed to add a level of difficulty to the game - so they cranked up the difficulty and frustration levels by making the crappest camera ever seen. If your opponent serves, the camera starts from an angle that only displays their side of the net. From there, it slooooooowly pans across to your side, sort of following the ball - slightly behind its movement. What this means in effect is that if the serve moves across to your side of the net with any pace, it's entirely conceivable that it will have smashed into the ground and you will lose a point - all without seeing anything at all on your side of the net. This results in the stupidest replays ever, as your characters simply stand there and watch the ball crash into the ground beside them. |
