It all starts with a breath-taking cut scene on a cruise ship, panning to Nina fighting hand to hand in a caged ring surrounded by nasty on lookers.
After she kicks butt with a mind blowing, bone-shattering blow to her opponent, the cut scene jumps from the arena and onto the deck of the cruise ship, where she is captured and placed in a room with a conveniently open balcony door.
Nina can now escape and let the adventure begin.
While Nina looks great taking down enemies in almost no clothing, the most important element is lacking... the game play. Most of the game is spent endlessly right analogue tapping to attack enemies, which is as bad as button meshing in my opinion.
Menus are too slow and require load time just to open. Accidentally pushing the wrong button results in the frustration of sitting around and waiting to push cancel to get back into the game.
The menus show skills learned and the number of skill points needed to gain a new skill. I found that it wasn`t necessary to pay attention to this and just ignored the combos completely; it didn`t make a difference anyway. Players might as well keep their eyes closed and push the analogue sticks hoping for the best.
While it`s great watching scantily clad Nina doing a combo roundhouse kick, the inconsistent analogue control will leave her kicking at nothing while the enemy moves out of the way. Sometimes the combos don`t even work and Nina will be doing cartwheels when the intention was for her to give an enemy a nice swift kick in the face. Her attacks also sound more like a whip being cracked, then an actual kick or punch.
Boss fights are just normal fights, extended. Basically hitting, kicking, going through the menu to refill health, then repeating until the boss is dead. There is no true challenge or tactic.
A nice touch to the game is the critical strike moves. Once Nina`s purple focus meter is full, pressing R2 will switch to an X-Ray view, which allows players to watch the enemy`s vital organs explode. This is all well and great until the enemy simply gets up and dusts himself off and continues the fight. What`s the point of special attacks if they don`t do anything special, except look impressive?
There is a plethora of weapons throughout the game, from Uzis to katanas but these don`t last very long. And who needs them if Nina can do more damage with her bare hands anyway? The automatic guns don`t work properly either, as there is a wait time between each shot making the gun useless.
The game lacks urgency, so Nina trails around aimlessly trying to finish her next objective. It is not just a typical beat-em-up, there are also the Resident Evil type puzzle solving scenarios, so get ready for some tedious "right key to fit the right door" and finger print searching. Often players have to backtrack through areas just to unlock a new door to get a key to run to the other side of the ship to get another key.
I don`t see why Namco didn`t make it a bit more like the movies - drag the knocked out bad guy and use his hand for the fingerprint scanner; it would have felt more realistic that way.
Players will also have to search for save points, proximity being indicated by a reception bar, much like on a cell phone, in the top right hand corner. The closer you are to a save point the more bars on the indicator - so prepare for a little hide and seek. I found that the save point bar isn`t very accurate. A full bar could indicate that the save point is above, below, or straight ahead - it`s anyone`s guess.
Even though the game has some outstanding cut scenes, the models themselves do need a bit of work. Nina walks and runs like some break-dancer doing "the robot". Even while holding the run button Nina moves much to slowly for an action game. This becomes a problem when trying to be stealthy around trip wire puzzles.
The voice acting is awful... awful, awful, awful!
It`s sterile and stereotyped and seems as if the developers didn`t bother trying to find decent voice actors. Nina sounds more like a man with too much testosterone, than a saucy-kick-some-butt-temptress. The voice doesn`t fit the part at all and no matter how stunning they made her look the voice is a big put off. It`s absolutely shocking.
Namco tried to use Tekken`s fame to make a quick buck off this one. If a little more thought was put into the game and some attempt was made to iron out the flaws, I would have said go for it. But this game left me unfulfilled an a little annoyed.
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