Rise of the Kasai

The good: story's nice
The bad: combat is a mess
Sequel to a little-known PS2 game from a while back, Rise of the Kasai is an action-adventure title with a unique combat system. The main feature of the game is a right analog stick targeting system. By targeting enemies, in which more than one at a time is possible, you highlight them with corresponding face buttons like x, circle, or square. Theoretically, this system should make combat fun and strategic, but it just makes battles boring and messy. So what prides itself as a methodical battle system turns out to be just a button-mashing affair. With this, you'll rarely want to get into fights since enemies are numerous and usually takes long to kill. There are several weapons and combos for all four playable characters but the combos are hard to perform consistently and the weapons fail to make any sort of fulfilling impact when they contact enemies.

The stealth sections of the game are more fun, even if they're basically just waiting for enemies to look the other way. One big downfall in these sections is the lack of a manual camera control. You can't pan or rotate the camera so there's no way of knowing what's around corners and blind spots. Instead, you have to rely on "look-out" posts using you're spirit guide to peek around the environs. The concept is nice but you'll get tired of it quickly.

However, the story is quite good and told remarkably well through a series of hand-drawn, artistic cinemas which complement well the good voice acting. Its too bad that you'll have to play the game to witness the story. (2/5)