Go Fanboy - Everyone Has A Favorite

Imagine a scenario if you will. You're urgently trying to get to your babe or your guiding pixie. Thing is, a load of monsters and bad guys are in your way. Now in this situation, I'd shy down and try to reason with the guys, no matter how ugly.

But not the hero of Beserk, Guts. No, he'll just pull out his huge sword and hack the bastards to death.

With a quick pull of the left trigger, Guts' sword is unleashed and a few button-bashes later, the enemy is dead on the floor with sprays and pools of blood everywhere. Big, deformed baddies, or regular-type baddies in armour, none are too big a deal for Guts.

But it is rather a big deal for anyone who picks up Sword of the Berserk: Guts' Rage. Quite simply, the gameplay sections of the game are very linear. No matter who or what you're up against - regular guys, monsters or bosses, it's always a case of just using a few attacks Guts has at his disposal in a repetitive fashion to get through the hoarde of incoming enemy trash. You can choose to fist fight or sword fight, but it never involves much skill and the range of enemy attacks is pitiful.

In a similar style to Zombie Revenge, you need to have killed all the abddies in an area in order to proceed, where you may move onto the enxt part of an area (or maybe even a new area altogether) where - essentially - you just ick the same ass with the same techniques all over again. At least Zombie Revenge had some killer background ideas, whereas this - well, doesn't.

Visuals:: Visually, however, Beserk is a superb game. The clean, smooth graphics engine supports an excellent level of texture detail, and occasionally enters into a nice 60fps display. This system is milked to its fullest with the inclusion of a LOT of cut-scenes. At points, there are fie consecutively. And if you're into that sort of thing, it's nice - the story even develops somewhat later in the game. But when these movies are interrupted by more tedium, who cares? This is a game, not a movie.

Audio:: Another plus is that Beserk generally pleases in the sound department. The musical score often lends to the atmoshpeher, and the sound effects make the blood-squirting, body-hacking action all the more grotesque. Another good thing is that there are some nice RPG-like character ideas in there.

Overall:: To make the imprecise, sketchy gameplay even worse, the collision detection is bad. It doesn't really matter where you point the sword, just smash the buttons facing in the general direction (no, wait, you can even stand with the enemy BEHIND you) and you're bound to hit home.

Score:: 4.0/10