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Feb 25 2005
Rengoku: The Tower of Purgatory Review
PSP Game Review | Action
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| Summary: Interesting but flawed experience
35
This 'review' is only after putting in a couple of hours into this game. I am not touching on the storyline, as it's all narrated in Japanese and I skipped most of it.
Rengoku: Tower of Purgatory features a rather fresh concept for a handheld - the 3D over-the-shoulder action shooter. Like many PC and console games before it, this one attempts to bring its own look & feel to bear, as well as new variations on the theme.
The gameplay consists of your character navigating an array of mazelike maps segmented into individual rooms. This layout no doubt helps the PSP in loading each area without having to stream from the UMD (a concern for open-map games like the upcoming Grand Theft Auto). In each area, you may or may not encounter enemies which may drop items. These items can then be fused to your character's chitin-like armor, creating a new look for each weapon and combination. Items can be added to arms, head, legs, hands, etc.
The flow of the game feels pretty repetitive. Go to new room, fight enemies, get stuff, add stuff to body (or delete), move on. You have a map you can check, but not while the game is running. I'll add that the Japanese content may give some people a hard time with the item-add-on menus (even though I read and speak a little Japanese, it was tough at first). Also, since I haven't played this game all that much, there may be some gameplay variations (bosses and such) that I haven't seen yet to break up the monotony.
The graphics look nice when still, but when moving around, the floor geometry shows separation between polygons and whole wall pieces clip (disappear) if you get too close to them and the camera intersects. The smearing/streaking is quite bad in this game, as well. I'm getting nervous about this aspect of the PSP LCD -- while some games like Puzzle Bobble and Darkstalkers don't show this problem, Ridge Racers hinted at it and this game is nearly ruined by it. Perhaps the new Samsung display will up the response time for USA models, but that's probably wishful thinking.
Even though the game smears and the 3D environment clips, it still looks fairly impressive (few things don't on the big vibrant PSP screen) and the novelty of adding stuff to your biomechanoid hero and seeing it appear is kind of intriguing, at first, anyway.
At this point in my playing of this game, it's an interesting but flawed experience. I just really hope other games don't have such smearing issues. The clipping is just bad coding (there should be limits to the positioning of the camera).
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Comments
I believe in Ridge Racers, it is a motion blur effect, it is intended, not the LCD... you can see it with the red lights in darker areas (or a night race) as well... its definitely intended.
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Yes, there are certainly aspects of car streaking of RR that are intentional, but there's also some unintentional blurring of the environment and other elements.
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Not sure what the problem with blurring is on RR - mine looks fine. There are definitely parts of the car that blur intentionally, and esp so with nitro. But env and other elements - most of the time its crystal clear, esp in the replays when you can enjoy the views :-) If the LCD is slow response you would be seeing aberrations across all screens elements - from menus, to backgrounds, to foregound items.. so far I havent seen that yet. Oh you would also see 'smearing' when playing back movies too.
The game sounds good - but the clipping and zipping problems dont sound too nice. Bit of a shame really (the poly with separation sounds like a error rounding issue - used to happen on PS2 as well, VU coding is sloppy is my guess). BTW streaming from the UMB shouldnt be too bad (up to 11MB/sec which is about double that of PS2) - however, will use bit more battery time. For some stats on PSP's internals: link
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The PSP ASV Sharp display has a response time of 25ms and exhibits red or yellow shifting or ghosting depending on the game, video, framerate. Sampled video (around 29fps) shows this quite strongly unless the framerate is low (like 15fps).
The Ridge Racers environments do blur or ghost slightly at times, depending on the track. This is unrelated to the speed-blur effects put on cars and on the overall view during nitro boost. The starting Rally X minigame also ghosts (red) when scrolling around the map. In Darkstalkers/VC, the framerate of the characters is lower so you don't see any problems, but when you go to gallery mode and view portraits, scrolling the bigger-than-screen sized images causes smearing.
At this point, it's also possible some people are starting to get Samsung screen equipped PSP units, which may or may not have an elevated response time.
Edit: To bring this back on topic, yes, Rengoku definitely produces a ghosting/smearing effect when you're navigating the various rooms.edited: Feb 26 2005
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Why is this review showing "100 out of 100??" That's rather obviously not what I intended.
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The ghosting on PSP's isn't that bad and I didn't find rengoku to be an exception, this game is very good but it's not for everyone. I love that gamespot review that gives the game a 50% rating, from the review and especially the gameplay video it's clear the guy doesn't even understand how to play the game, so no wonder he gave it a crappy review, the level design and certain aspects of the game are repetetive but it doesn't really hurt the gameplay, and considering that the levels change everytime you start a new game this doesn't seem so bad.edited: Apr 29 2005
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What more to the game is there than what is described in the 5.2 rating review Gamespot gave it?
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Could someone please adjust this rating? It shouldn't read "100" as it does now. If I remember right, I gave this 3 or 4 stars. Please give it a 35 out of 100.
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