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| bam! entertainment |
bam! entertainment |
Action |
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M |
Reign of Fire
Reviewed by: Infestator
Ever watch the movie and wanted to take part in the dragon slaying action? Well with Reign of Fire for the XBOX you'll do all that and a whole bunch more.
The year is 2024 AD and the human race is in the brink of destruction; only a few human outposts remain scattered around the globe. The only hope for the human race is to take up arms against an enormous fire-breathing army that has overrun the Earth. The only question is, which side are you on?
Gameplay: Reign of Fire is a futuristic game that allows you to play as both human and dragon; however, you must complete all human missions before starting the dragon ones. Sadly, the human side is all vehicle driving and nothing else (no you may not even leave the vehicle to enter another). Although, driving while aiming does prove to be a challenge.
The gameplay can get extremely confusing. For instance, on the second level of the game, you're objective is to defend a small outpost. This is where the game gets icky. When the first fleet of flying dragons come in and start unleashing hell on your tiny vehicle, there is a chance your vehicle would burst into flames. When this happened to me, I got very confused, so my friend and I spent a couple minutes looking through the manual on how to extinguish the flames. After a few minutes of searching we found the answer. We had to find ourselves a fire truck. I unpaused the game and began playing once again. I looked everywhere, but there was no fire truck to be found on the level, so we just sat their until our health depleted and our vehicle blew up. Now after doing the mission a second time, the exact same thing happened, and again I searched, but still found no solution. This is when I finally gave up and restarted the mission. As you can see, this game can also get very frustrating.
On a side note, while playing this mission we came across many glitches, which included raptor-like creatures running through walls and my vehicle getting stuck in a wall.
Graphics: The graphics are dissapointing. It's 'PS2 port' traits are very noticable with its pixellated models and terrain. Even the movement animations are poor. For example, whenever you shoot down a dragon all it does is stop flapping its wings and plop straight down slaming into the floor and shaking the screen (when I say straight down, I mean a straight drop vertically).
As I mentioned earlier, there are many bugs that should've been fixed before the game was released. Throughout my whole Reign of Fire experience, I've come across a half-bodied raptor stuck in the ground (not actually meant to be in the game), a raptor that runs through walls, a dragon that drops dead right through a wall, and a vehicle that gets stuck in a wall.
Aside from that, the game doesn't even have it's own made sequences, they're just clips taken from the movie.
Controls: Thank god, something positive! The game controls are easy to learn (as are most games controls). There are two default controls, one for humen and one for dragons; however you can change the control set-up in the in-game options to a more advanced configuration.
Replay: Reign of Fire has a poor replay value. The missions are extremely long and difficult and there are parts that get really frustrating and/or confusing (as stated in the gameplay section) and once you've beaten the game, nothing special happens.
Unless you really want to play the game throughout and watch the movie clips, I don't see any point in replaying this game.
Sound: The sounds in Reign of Fire can get very repetitive. Throughout the whole game all you hear is the sound of either various weapons firing, vehicles blowing up, or things dying. I'm not saying that these sounds are a nuisance, but they could be expanded on. Background music could also be more action-like as opposed to slow tainted music.
Overall Presentation: Overall, Reign of Fire is not as amazing at it appears to be, it is rather dissapointing. The movie was a far better experience in my opinion, despite the fact that the sequences in the game are taken from the movie.
This game needed a lot more work before it was released because there are a few quite noticable bugs and glitches.
Scores:
Gameplay:  5.5
Graphics: 6
Controls:  8
Replay:  3.5
Sound:  5
Total Score: 5.6
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