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Guns, swords, gangsters, narcotics, the undead, and the ghost
of a rock star; sounds like a winning formula for an Action game,
does it not? Well presumably that’s what Red Entertainment thought
when they created the madness that is Gungrave Overdose,
sequel to the PlayStation cult classic Gungrave.
 Picking up
three years after the events of Gungrave, Gungrave
Overdose follows the exploits of the Deadman Beyond The Grave
and Mika, returning characters from the original, as well as new
characters, Deadman Juji Kasabane - the bad boy anti-hero - and
Rocketbilly Red Cadillac - the aforementioned dead rock star. If it
sounds strange, that’s because it is.
Gungrave Overdose is a third-person perspective Action
title in the vein of God Of War
and the Devil May Cry series.
The aim of the game is to battle your way through the games nine
Stages using a combination of ranged and melee weapons in your quest
to eliminate the a highly addictive and evil drug known as Seed. The
game only allows you to see Beyond The Grave initially, but as you
complete the stages you can unlock Juji and Rocketbilly as playable
characters, each with different weapons and moves. Movement is
controlled by the left Analogue Stick, Cross performs a jump and
pressing Cross and a direction on the Analogue Stick triggers a dive
in that direction. Circle and Square initiate melee and ranged
attacks respectively and Triangle executes a Demolition Shot.
Repeatedly pressing an attack button causes the character to
initiate a burst attack useful for taking down lots of enemies.
Holding down Square, or Circle in the case of Juji, allows the
character to charge his weapon and unleash a far more powerful
succession of shots. Enemies can be stunned by jumping straight up
and pressing Circle, while pulling down on the Analogue Stick and
pressing Circle causes the character to take a defensive posture,
reducing damage from enemy attacks. L1 locks onto an enemy and R1
changes the target. Pressing L2 causes the character to turn 180°
quickly while R2 makes the character strike a taunting pose.
The characters have two types of health. The first is a
shield which recharges if the character takes no action and is not
hit for several seconds. The second is your actual health which only
decreases if the shield is depleted and can not be replaced during a
Level except by causing large amounts of damage with a Demolition
Shot. The game allows you infinite continues from the last
checkpoint you reached and they occur regularly at natural-break
points, so the game is challenging, but not impossible. The title
features surprisingly fast load times for a low-budget PlayStation2
release, allowing the tempo of the game to be kept high at all
times.
A key part of the game is the Demolition Shot. Demolition
Shots are very powerful attacks with the potential to clear whole
rooms of enemies. Each character has three types of Demolition Shot
and each has three power levels. In order to use a
Demolition Shot the character must have Demolition Shot ammo,
this is gained by collecting ‘Beats’, which are basically hits
from attacks. Every time you achieve ten Beats in a row the
Demolition Shot ammo gauge increases and when it is full the
Demolition Shot Counter increases by one. Demolition Shots also play
a more strategic part in the game than simply destroying enemies as
they replace roughly half of the shield bar when used, essential in
the more difficult battles that take place later in the game. When
firing a Demolition Shot a Jackpot meter appears. This meter counts
the amount of hits caused by the Demolition Shot and the higher the
number, the more chance of unlocking the next level of Demolition
Shot at the end of the Stage.
If you manage to kill your enemies in what the game considers
a more “artistic” manner new moves and extras can be unlocked.
This adds a degree of replayability to the game but it isn’t
entirely clear what is considered an artistic move. Most of the
games enemies attack in three ways, with machine guns, rocket
launchers or melee weapons. Machine gun enemies can be dispatched
using a characters’ ranged weapons but melee and rocket launcher
enemies have shields, this means they should be engaged with melee
weapons either by generally beating them up or, in the case of
rocket launcher wielding foes, reflecting their projectile back at
them with a well timed swing of your melee weapon.
This simple system, once perfected, is quite fun and adds a
tactical dimension to the game as the player must think about which
attack to use in each situation. Most of the games stages are based
around several connecting rooms filled with enemies of various sizes
and occasionally these are interrupted by some sort of Boss
encounter. Despite the title’s simplicity, boredom is not a
problem due to the unbelievably large number of opponents and the
variety of the Bosses you‘ll face. A reoccurring problem
throughout the title is the below average AI. At some points,
enemies with swords run straight into walls in an attempt to hit you
and on more than one occasion, kamikaze bombers will self destruct
in the middle of enemy troops, which, although it makes your job a
lot easier, is a little unrealistic. Also, sometimes enemies just in
range of the characters ranged weapons will not react to being shot
and can be killed without any retaliation - providing the perfect
chance for some more artistic slaughtering, but removing any degree
of challenge.
In game graphics are of an average quality for the
PlayStation2. The characters are drawn well and clear to see and
Bosses and the larger enemies look good. However
the standard enemies are not anything special to look at, but
this may be due to hardware constraints as there are generally a lot
of enemies on the screen. A great deal of the scenery is
destructible and makes the game that bit more exciting as the rooms
tend to explode around you as you run around dispensing death and
destruction in a manner  similar to the infamous lobby scene from The
Matrix. One of the real plus points of Gungrave Overdose is
the fifty-three minutes of anime cut-scenes designed by Yasuhiro
Nightow. Apart from a small amount of bad casting, (the actor
playing Juji doesn’t sound half as dangerous as he should!) these
scenes are highly entertaining and some of the fight scenes look
like they were cut straight from a Manga film, despite the
games 12+ PEGI rating. In game sound is average, the gunfire sound
effects are brilliantly full of bass and sound fantastic, but the
in-game speech from enemies sounds badly sampled and the music is
easily forgettable.
The title is highly entertaining and plays like a really good
old school Third-Person Action game. The games minor grievances are
easily forgiven due to the pick up and play factor, the ludicrously
excessive levels of destruction, the awesome cut scenes and the fact
that is just fun to play. Available with an RRP below
£25 and
boasting around ten to eleven hours of gameplay with just one
character, this bad boy offers very good value for money. So, go on,
indulge yourself in probably the craziest game you’ll play this
year - and find out how
rock and roll really does kill people.
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