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Urban Terror
Once I got past the lame characters and setting, Reign seemed like it'd be the perennial modern beat 'em up, upon which all others that come after it should follow. And it was. For the first chunk of missions. Then in comes the dealbreaker: the obnoxious, out of control difficulty. Urban Reign takes three step attack of the beat 'em up format - One. beat people up; Two -- run down the street, and Three -- repeat – and does away with step two and three. "Here's what's going on down in this room," says Brad's employer, "You weren't listening to me? That's okay, just kill everybody."
Piece them all together and it's like a pornographic violence travelogue: random scrambled scenes of Brad killing his way across a gauche landscape, each one always ending with someone on the ground on all fours. Really quite beautiful. Eventually a partner joins in (whether through multiplayer or the introduction of a CPU ally in the later missions) and that's when some real fun begins. Going at it alone has never been this frustrating.
The perfunctory presentation is what makes the game so addictive (well, potentially addictive) but it never fully settles into a groove. Urban Reign doesn't smoothly ramp up in difficulty. It's like a greatest hits collection compiled from a zillion different games, some great, some dreadful, some plain impossible. Like another Tekken-related project, the disturbing and awful Death by Degrees, the game actually offers to turn down the difficulty to deal with its cheapness.
Some missions you'll breeze through without a worry on the first try, while others, usually the one-on-one boss battles, are cheap and frustrating. Maybe it requires some kind of plane of thought that my brain can't process, because often it's when I stopped paying attention, thinking of creative ways to complain, that I was able to finish these fights.
In the missions where you're outnumbered, the Tekken moon physics don't help. After each completed mission, you're given some points to distribute to pump up Brad, but once past the quarter mark of the missions, he starts feeling underpowered in every way. Every hit's a stunner. Taking a cue from Fighting Vipers, everybody has regional stats and Brad's body parts start breaking down very, very quickly.
And then there's the juggling. Oh, boy, get ready to be part of a circus act. Now, us juggling the enemy? That's a lot of fun. But enemy juggling us? This ain't no Yakov Smirnoff joke. It sucks the other way around.
It's a real barb in the boxing glove: if you want to keep your pride and not lower the difficulty and play the game like intended, prepared to get exhausted, if not outright frustrated. You have to be on constant guard, constantly running for safety. Every opportunity for a counter has to be taken, and every effort has to be made to get out of being juggled. One round of gang crowd surfing can take nearly half of Brad's life away.
Reign of Pain
It takes so much effort to survive, but for what purpose? To see what happens next in the story? It is non-existent, remember? Even the crowd of unlockable extras is hardly worth the effort. To keep the player interested so the game doesn't feel dragged out as most beat 'em ups do, the action comes forward as quick and easy as finger snaps, with little downtime and narrative obstruction. This puts an extra burden on the gameplay because that's all there is to carry the game. You say you need someone to save the city. What mysterious figure can muster up that much strength?
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