back to index
				Graphics: 9.5 Gameplay: 8.0 Sound: 9.0 Control: 8.0 Replay Value: 9.0 Live play: 7.0 Rating: 8.0 Publisher:  Temco Developer:  Team Ninja Number Of Players:  1-4 (1-2 Online) Cheats Screenshots
			Print This Article

  Dead or Alive 4 may be the prettiest game on the Xbox 360 so far, but for players who are new to fighting games – and maybe even some who are longtime fans – it may also be one of the most frustrating.

  Characters

  As with most fighting games, the characters are key. Most of the characters are repeats from Dead or Alive 3, but there are three new characters that are immediately playable: Kokoro, a geisha in training; Elliot, a 16-year-old British boy and La Mariposa, a female Lucha Libre wrestler. In addition, a female Halo Spartan named Nicole is unlockable.

  Only 16 of 22 characters are immediately playable; the rest must be unlocked by playing through the story mode.

  As in the past, characters are well balanced. There appears to be no one character that is consistently harder to beat or otherwise more effective than the others. The rather petite female characters make up for their lack of size with speed and acrobatic moves, while the larger characters are slower but pack a fearsome punch.

  Character animations are amazing. Motion capture has served this game well. Martial arts devotees will again be treated to a variety of fighting styles. The most fun to watch is Brad Wong’s Drunken Fist, which consists of lazy staggering, casual lying about and lots of kicking. In fact, his style uses kicks and throws almost exclusively, and his signature move involves picking his opponent up by his ankles and driving him forward, wheelbarrow-style. (DOA4 has a mode where you can simply watch two or more AI characters go at it, and watching Brad Wong fight himself is quite a hoot.)

  Many, many ways to play

  For offline play, DOA 4 offers a story mode; a time attack (finish the game in the shortest time possible); a survival mode in which you take on a string of opponents; a team mode, a versus mode in which you can play against a friend locally; and a sparring, or tutorial, mode in which you can practice and learn moves against an opponent who doesn’t fight back.

  “Story mode” involves choosing a single character and then taking on the rest of the AI characters. It is called “story mode” because, allegedly, there is a plot. There’s very little in the way of explanation of that plot, and the subtitled dialogue doesn’t provide any illumination. In one game, my character, Jann Lee the bouncer, was set to fight Hitome, the German high school student. The match started with a cutscene in which he rescued her from an angry mother Tyrannosaurus Rex. Did she thank him? No – she beat the hell out of him. And matches still end with head-scratching taunts (“My poison is a neurotoxin. It works, doesn’t it?”) that were probably badly translated from Japanese. The series would do well to dispense with the cheesy and pointless “plot” and stick to the fighting.

  Being good at Dead or Alive 3 does not ensure success against AI players in this game, because the fighting engine has been ramped up in subtle but significant ways. AI opponents are better at blocking your moves and keeping you off-rhythm (or on the ground). Novice players would do well to avoid the inevitable ass-whupping they will receive trying to play the story mode and stick to online or local versus play.

  For Xbox Live play, DOA4 has perhaps the most bizarre lobby system in gaming. When you enter a lobby, you are represented by an avatar (a ninja, a princess, etc.) In contrast with the actual game, which strives for a certain amount of realism (or what passes for it in this stylish game), the Xbox Live lobby is all about cartoony cuteness a la Hello Kitty. You can hear other players’ voice chat, and some lobbies even have a TV monitor you can use to watch the current game in action. Players in the lobby take turns fighting, and depending on the options the host has set, will play either the loser or the winner of the last round.

  Lag can be a huge problem during online play, and the smoothness of a game can be adversely affected simply by the number of people waiting in the lobby for their turn. In the few online games I played, I didn’t experience significant or persistent lag, but I heard other players complaining about their problems with it.

  A variety of environments

  As in Dead or Alive 3 for the Xbox, the player can choose from a variety of environments, and many of them are destructible. However, the characters in DOA 4 interact with their environment in new ways, ways that materially affect gameplay. As before, characters can be thrown down stairs into whole new arenas. A fall is rarely fatal but certainly has an effect on the health meter.

  One level, Gambler’s Paradise, has you and an opponent playing in the streets of a Las Vegas-like city. Puddles on the ground reflect the lighted street signs and the characters, and a scrolling LCD sign in the middle of the street has the player’s Xbox Live motto. Bystanders who should be calling the cops about this street brawl instead cheer you on. (There’s probably money riding on the fight.) But this level is more than pretty – it’s dangerous. Cars don’t care who’s winning the fight and will hit the fighters and keep right on going, cutting into the health meter of the unlucky hit-and-run victim. Expert players can certainly use the traffic to their advantage, giving opponents a well-timed shove into that oncoming taxi.

  In another level, Savannah Safari, a cheetah will sometimes pounce and cause damage, and Experimental Playground is a Jurassic Park-like level where a careless pterodactyl will occasionally swoop in and wallop you or your opponent. Experimental Playground and Temple on the Mountain both have animals (dinosaurs and monkeys, respectively) that watch you fight and will scramble out of the way when the action gets too close.

  Controls

  According to the rudimentary directions, you can control your character’s movement forward or backward with the D-pad or the left stick. The X button blocks. The B button kicks, and the left stick controls whether it’s a high kick or a low kick/sweep. The Y button punches.

  Of course, the individual button presses are pretty meaningless; the combo button presses make the difference between success and failure. There are those who will claim that DOA4 is more than a mere button-masher. That may be the case, but unless one has time to memorize the insane number of combos available to each character, frantically mashing buttons is one’s only hope to ever land a punishing blow to an opponent. Apparently there are 100 different combos for each character. If you were the guy who hung around the arcade all day, lining up quarters on the Mortal Kombat game cabinet and playing for hours because you had all the combos memorized, this is your game.

  The combos are hard enough to execute in sparring/tutorial mode, where your opponent doesn’t fight back. When you’re in an actual match, though, combos are nearly impossible because of the variety of countermoves your opponent can throw at you to disrupt your execution. (I still have never been able to use Kasumi’s nifty head-stomping move in an actual match.)

  One nitpick about the controls: in the frenzy of mashing buttons, it’s too easy to hit the “start” button by mistake, which pauses the game and brings up a menu. After about the fourth time I did this in a story mode fight, I chose “quit” and went to ice my right hand.

  Eye-popping graphics

  The first thing you’ll notice when the game starts up is how beautiful it is, especially in HD. Characters and environments almost leap off the screen. Outdoor backgrounds are almost photorealistic.

  The graphics are far from perfect, however. Characters get glitchy when they get close together. Characters’ legs pass through each other routinely. During certain of my opponent’s moves (probably scripted ones), my blows pass right through him or her with no impact whatsoever. After all this time, and with all the computational power the 360 brings to bear, can’t someone get collision detection right?

  The water effects also fall short, which is unfortunate given that several of the fight settings have water. Standing water looks realistic and reflects the environment well enough, but there’s something off about the way it interacts with the characters. The water ripples a bit when the characters move through it, but not especially realistically. (My gaming buddy remarked that “it looks like they’re playing in mercury.”)

  To the relief of DOA fanboys everywhere, one graphical trademark that continues to improve in the series is the impressively realistic bouncing breasts on the female characters. It may be that Team Ninja had an entire team whose job was just to perfect the Jiggle Engine.

  Sound

  The game supports 5.1 and sounds very nice. However, because this is a fighting game, the surround function doesn’t get much of a workout. Other than crowd noise if you are playing in an arena setting, there’s not much of interest coming from the rear speakers.

  The music is typical fighting-game techno, except for the Aerosmith cut that plays over the opening demo video.

  The bottom line

  Dead or Alive 4 is a well-done fighting game that has a lot to offer fans of the series and of fighting games in general. Even seasoned veterans will have a hard time mastering it. For more casual and novice players, the game is worth a rental for the graphics alone but will probably prove too frustrating to justify a purchase.

2/27/2006  Tracey 'Jerri Blank' McCartney