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Batman: Rise of Sin Tsu
  PS2Beat_em_upUC  
  opened by paleface at 02:04:50 01/11/04  
  last modified by paleface at 12:27:18 03/05/24  
  paleface [sys=PS2; cat=Beat_em_up; reg=NA]
           
Reference added: 16
  "Batman games on PS2"
 
A much better effort than the last Batman game (see entry 16), RoST shamelessly borrows the gameplay and level-up mechanisms of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (entry 158), with two additions: co-op play, ala The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (entry 372)--which came out at about the same time as RoST, so we can at least give Ubi's dev team credit for coming up with the co-op gameplay on their own, and team-up moves, in which one player executes a move and waits for the second play to execute its follow-up to finish the strike.
 
The team-up moves are cool, the rip-off of gameplay from LotR less cool--but if you had to rip of a game, that's not a bad one to pick. The real problem with RoST is that it just doesn't have the production values to compete with EA's Lord of the Rings games. In RoST you proceed through level after level of boxy streets, warehouses and crates, all remarkably unispiring, to fight wave after wave of completely generic thugs--these guys make orcs look sexy. Heck, you don't even get any kind of boss fight until the third or fourth level, and aside from being invisible most of the time that boss puts up even less of a fight than the thugs.
 
I got this because a friend and I needed another co-op game after finishing Return of the King, and it didn't hurt that it was cheap. It fulfilled the burning need for a co-op game, and to be fair it is pretty solid in what it does... but it just doesn't do enough to hold a candle to the Lord of the Rings games. It feels like the developer had enough funding to create a game with the necessary base mechanics but were then told to polish it up and ship it before they had time to create unique settings or villains. Now mind you I've only played the first twenty percent of the game or something but aside from the one team-up move we unlocked, it has been completely mediocre thus far.
 
And yet the funny thing is that it goes right up to the top few co-op beat-em-up games on the system--there's a surprising dearth of these things, when you think about it. And if you wanted one that supported more than two players? Phaw, good luck. Let's just hope that Champions of Norrath finally blazes that particular trail next month.
    
 
references:
· Batman: Vengeance (PS2)

 
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