The Spammy Character :(

It took me a while to really realise this, but it seems that nearly every 3D fighting game I play these days has 'that' character. Yaknow, the one that can always cause trouble and take about 50 tries to beat. Yeah that one:

This all started when I decided to get Soul Calibur IV. Now I actually don't suck at fighting games, I loved soul calibur 2, street fighter 2, tekken e.t.c. And as a result I was very good at those games. Getting into SC4 I noticed that although i could beat nearly every character on medium or hard difficulties, I would always get to The Apprentice and get my ass handed to me. I would change my playing style to offensive, defensive, throwing you name it, but whatever I did my skills were to no avail. Even with an easy difficulty I would require about 7 tries to advance. This just wrecks the whole experience for me, I really hate being good at games and then being taught a lesson due to some horrid balancing.

This is not the only case either, I finally decided to get a new psp after mine broke like 3 years ago, with it I had tekken dark ressurection, which I also used to be very good at back when I had my PSP base pack all those years ago.
But this guy always flattens my advances, one punch at a time.

Yeah STEVE!!! I hate this australian gimp with my back teeth :(

Now your probably just thinking, you just suck at this game. On the contrary my questioning reader, I can play through tekken DR on the second to hardest difficulty, but getting to this guy requires me to lower my difficulty to easy and still lose. Grrrrrrr.

Just a small rant there!

Exit DS

I'm not really a big fan of puzzle games, unless it's tetris. However, I think EXIT DS actually had a more unique approach that buying it seemed necessary (Plus it was only £2 when I bought it).

Exit DS is a puzzle game in which you play as the fantastic escape artist so aptly named Mr.Esc.
 Along the way Mr.Esc will be escaping burning building s and saving dogs and humans alike.

Gameplay:

Gameplay is nearly completely controlled with the touch screen doing everything from pushing crates to moving characters around. However, one problem with the game is sometimes how the controls are implemented.
Things like moving the elevator and dropping off larger edges is done by tapping Mr.Esc and dragging down on the touch screen, this can be a major problem when you get to a tricky part of the game, get to the end of the level only to die because your tap wasn't good enough for the game. It's not a major problem, but it will frustrate players every few levels.
Speaking of controls, the game doesn't really do a whole lot of good explaining them either, simple things like placing a plank across two ledges was extremeley difficult because knowing where to tap was so damn vague. The most infurating part of all though , the rescuees. After rescuing a person in a level, by pressing a button they will follow you, but not always the way you want them, so say they are following Mr.Esc whilst being under the stairs, problems like walking off ledges and into fires.
Lastly, The camera could have used a bit of tweaking as after moving the camera and then once going to issue a command the camera flicks back without any manual control option.


Graphics:

Graphically, Exit DS is pretty good looking for a 2D game. It utilizes a Comic/Cel Shaded effect to a really nice degree, all the characters and sets look like they've jumped out of sort of comic. I also really liked some of the animations, such as the fire and even Mr.Esc himself, they really suited the comicbook/paper style.

 Sound:

Sound isn't amazing on exit DS unfortunately, levels have a nice theme to each of them in terms of music, some being quite generic whilst others are actually quite entertaining and even catchy. Despite the music there is still the screechy annoyance that the other characters in the game pose. Every five seconds you will hear the HELP ME! of all the unrescued people on the level, this can be extremely irritating, well at least for me. Sometimes I thought the reason they were so annoying was so I would just play the game to shut them up.

 Conclusion:

Altogether, EXIT DS is an enjoyable puzzle romp, despite it's minor inconveniences and intial teething problems. Especially at prices under £5 nearly everywhere now, this is a good buy for anyone with a DS really.


So I think this one get's the BUY mark.


PROS:

+ Fun game
+ Can actually be really challenging
+ Has wi-fi
+ Cool level design
+Nice graphical style


Cons:

-Iffy controls at times
-Crap tutorials
-Annoying characters