This series has always prided itself on offering a hybrid of all the fighters of the era and the second iteration does this successfully as well. The fighting system is also a joy to behold in this title as well. It’s a lot of fun and a great addition to the game. Plus, you have the custom mode which is like playing the game with cheat codes such as god mode, big head mode and all the classic settings. The watch mode that allows you to take in AI fighters and learn new moves and weaknesses. You have the new survival mode where you have to beat every character with just one health bar. Then when it comes to the new game modes, the game does a great job at giving the player everything they could ever want.
So this is a welcome bonus and one that elevates the series. But if they can offer some captivating exposition, it really ties everything together and motivates the player to fight. Fighting games aren’t often remembered for their narrative and rightly so. However, its the small tweaks that make this one worthwhile as a sequel.įirst, the story is a great continuation of the original, with the rogue group of Tylon Zylonthorpes fighting for the dignity of their race. There is still the usual suspects in terms of game modes such as story and arcade mode and the visuals keep the same look and feel of the original, while adding a new layer of polish to the overall presentation. The player still has access to a wide variety of brutally beastly characters to fight with and against. What Bloody Roar 2 does brilliantly on its return is keeping the same great gameplay that we had from the first game in the series, yet elevating ever slightly. However, would this gimmick prove successful a second time? Or would this animal-based fighter fizzle out? We find out in our review of Bloody Roar 2. This game aimed to offer a unique take on the fighting game genre by using beasts instead of human combatants. However, looking outside the series, this game also plays like Tekken, Street Fighter, Soulblade, Mortal Kombat and Dead or Alive. This game plays like it’s predecessor Bloody Roar. The most competitive market of those mentioned was easily fighting games, with tonnes of fighters vying to be the household names on everyone’s lips and fresh off the back of a successful first outing, Bloody Roar 2 stepped up to plate hoping to cement this series as fighting game royalty. This era was the pinnacle for this phenomenon with racing games, sports games and fighting games all offering a compelling way to pummel your pals. While the storyline in most fighters is merely a superfluous excuse to let the gathered combatants beat the crap out of each other, it actually adds to the overall flavor of Bloody Roar 2.If gaming in the nineties is synonymous with one thing, it is arguably couch co-op gaming. The mode most gamers will enjoy playing is the story mode, which gives you a good deal of background material on each fighter. While the new characters are much better than the ones they replaced, and the number of available moves per character has increased, the incentive to keep on playing wanes severely after a few rounds. Without this function, Bloody Roar 2 reverts to the all-out frontal assault that the import version of the first game was. While there is an option in the custom mode that activates the sidestep (performed by pressing right after executing a block), it's hardly intuitive and only serves to give the computer an additional edge while you struggle with the controls. Gratuitous character swapping aside, little has changed from the first game, prompting the question, "why bother?" Why bother indeed when Bloody Roar 2 actually takes a step back and removes the ease of executing the sidestep! For reasons unfathomable, somebody actually went ahead and removed the perfectly functional sidestep, which was the main reason the American version of BR1 was a fairly balanced fighter. One would think that this is a prequel, except that the story mode indicates that BR2 does indeed follow in the footsteps of the first game. Oddly enough, Bakuryu the mole and Uriko, the boss from BR1 are back, except that they both look like teenagers now. The difference is that they took out the characters Mitsuko (the female boar, yuck!), Greg (the monkey man), and Hans (the girly-looking fox guy), and replaced them with four new characters - Marvel (the leopard girl), Busuzima (the chameleon), Jenny (the bat chick), and Stun (the insect). The problem is that it is a repeat of the first game.