What's been achieved here is something new and extra-special in the world of rubbish accents. I was tempted to describe him as a graduate of the Dick Van Dyke School of Foreign Accents, but this would be unfair to Dick who was, after all, capable of expressing a foreign accent, just usually not the correct one. If you imagine the worst cod-Oirish accent you can muster, you should know it barely touches the horrors that Raven's voice actor has managed to express.
The voices are so badly cast, plodding, full of bizarre and unwelcome stresses and pauses and EMPHASIS as to make it impossible to control your mirth at the production values and feeling that you'd rather hack your own knees off than play this game. It is, however, taken to new rungs of substandard ridiculousness by the voice acting. The actual effect is to slow all the fights down, making them easier, and also added some much-needed colour. They also let you get really drunk, something which is supposed to make fighting difficult. The bar is the home of Tracy and Melvin, who give you advice and side-quests for cash, and teach you new but unhelpful moves. You'll spend quite a bit of time in The Hole, a dive in Downtown Las Santos, er, Sombras, which is the grim city in which you're on your mission to smack faces. Avenging by smacking in the faces of everyone you meet never quite goes smoothly, and before you know it you're also smacking the faces of generic mob boss, and his generic henchmen along with various generic police> and others. You discover one of the other characters is a traitor, so predictably off you cavort in a red mist of vengeance, thus the name of the game. I chose Raven, because I loved his manly scar.Ĭharacter picked, the game deftly lumbers from cliché to cliché. You start as one of the five main characters, whom apparently all have different special moves, although you'd be hard-pushed to notice. The story? Stop me if you've heard this one before. This game, in its infinite foulness, has nothing.
I just like to see it done with some style, and above all, some point. But I know what you're going to say and you're wrong. It's at this point that I can hear the rustling sound of impatient forum fingers skipping to the end and unleashing witty counterarguments. Strictly not to be supplied to any persons capable of rational thought". It's that the entire title screams "Game designed for IQs 60 and below.
It's not just that it sounds like a movie that even your friendly neighbourhood porn dungeon will have placed in its "speciality" section.
Isn't it odd that there exists a whole litany of games that we instinctively know are going to be plumbing the festering sinkholes of gaming before we even play them? Once such indicator of impending polygonal doom is a game's being titled "Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance", a title which is remarkable in its Nostradamus-like ability to prefigure the train-wreck of tragicomic wrongness about to unfold.