Anarchy Reigns Review

Prior to this being assigned to me, I had no idea what Anarchy Reigns was. After a bit of research, I discovered that it was a sequel to MadWorld where you hack-and-slash your way to victory. I remember MadWorld getting a lot of praise when it came out so was pretty eager to get my dirty little mits on this game, but after fifteen minutes of playing, I regretted that thought.

Like any reasonable gamer I jumped into the campaign rather than the multiplayer. Soon after, I realised that PlatinumGames had focused heavily on an online brawling game and once that was finished they noticed they had two weeks left until their deadline, so haphazardly put together something very lightly matching a campaign mode.

You can play as either one of two characters in the campaign, Jack Cayman (black side) who is the returning protagonist from MadWorld wielding a mounted chainsaw gun on his arm and the death of his daughter in his heart, or Leo Victorion (white side), an agent of the Bureau's Strike One Unit, who has charged plasma blades on his elbows and a fresh clump of fibre putty in his hair. Both sides are looking to find Max Caxton, who killed Jack's daughter and was Leo's mentor.

This is about as much of the story as I understood because that's all you're really given. Whichever side you pick, you then go out and start fighting thugs and mutants and God knows what else happens to be on the streets of this apparently "open-world story-driven campaign". I say apparently, because it soon becomes obvious that it's not all that open and is heavily driven by mutilating enemies to gain points to unlock missions to mutilate more enemies.

The combat is average. It's by no means Batman: Arkham series level, but it's all the game has going for it. You use two of the face buttons for heavy and light attacks and hold down a shoulder button to modify these into special versions of each. The other two face buttons are reserved for blocking/dodging oncoming attacks, and grabbing enemies/picking up objects. I would like to say that getting the right balance of using all of these is a must in Anarchy Reigns but in reality, I was just using heavy and light attacks over and over, occasionally throwing a dodge in.

As you defeat enemies, you build up 'rampage' which, when the meter is full, you can unleash allowing you to take down much larger enemies or larger groups of enemies faster for about twenty seconds or so. Entering a rampage can swing a boss match in your favor quite quickly if, for whatever reason, you're losing.

Whilst the visuals look different if you choose to play as Jack rather than Leo, they feel more or less the same. It doesn't feel like there's any weight to the characters attacks because enemies just crumble when you hit them. Even with the big beasties or bosses, it didn't really feel like there was any "push-back" from them when I hit them. This also carried over to the multiplayer scene where you get an array of characters to choose from.

You may be thinking "Okay, the fighting is okay and the story is cringeworthy, but surely it's good to look at in this day and age? Right?!" but alas, it's not. The graphics seem dated and low resolution, and I only know this because of the few times my camera didn't decide to throw itself behind a wall, blocking everything. To match this, you're made to sit through badly out-of-sync voice segments where you have two torsos and heads talking trash to each other about how they are going to do so much damage to one another. It wasn't only embarrassing but unskippable.

Onto the multiplayer and this is where I thought Anarchy Reigns would really come into it's own. Like I said previously, it seems that the campaign of Anarchy Reigns was just an extra to the multiplayer so I had some hope for it yet. I played online for a few hours and in that time, came into contact with no more than a dozen players. There were two higher level players (33-ish) and the rest of us were all level 1.

This meant that, not only was I getting obliterated in an online grab-fest in which I couldn't move for more than a few seconds without being pinned to another player whilst they performed their grab move on me or being kicked into the air, but I couldn't get any experience to level my character any higher to greater defend myself from this onslaught. I can appreciate that it's supposed to be anarchic but this was just off the scale and not a fun experience.

I did have a bad run with multiplayer due to the lack of people online but I can see that there's potential in it, should players actually decide to populate the servers and give some varying degree to the levels. You can choose from a variety of characters from the game's campaign mode to play with, starting off with eight but expanding to more than double that. Luckily you don't have to sit through the campaign to unlock more characters; they can all be unlocked through multiplayer progression or campaign play.

There's a few different gameplay modes including a 16-player Battle Royale mode and an american football styled mode alongside the traditional deathmatches and capture the flag. You also have some co-op if, like me, you don't like getting your face smooshed in; Survival and Mad Survival - a horde type mode where enemies continuously spawn and attack you. The only difference between survival and mad survival is that the latter consists of the game's campaign bosses attacking you.

All in all, I can't say that Anarchy Reigns is exactly my cup o' tea. The campaign is pants, featuring cheesy cut scenes, dated-graphics and clunky controls but the multiplayer is promising if you like mad brawling and low server counts. I think Anarchy Reigns main pitfall is that it's appealing to a niche in the market, but not having anything for those who aren't fans of a nostalgic street brawler.