The first Powerstone game was truly a hit and miss title when it came to gamers accepting it's innovations. On one hand, some gamers loved the ability to move around in true 3D and interact with their environments in order to defeat your opponent. But on the other side, gamers hated the fact you couldn't block, and you could easily jump kick your way to victory. With the newest addition to the series, Powerstone 2 easily makes up for the gripes of all gamers out there, while somehow making the action even more frantic than ever.

Honestly, I don't want to bore you guys with the story behind the entire game, mainly because this is a fighting game and truth be told, one shouldn't care about why all of our heroes are trapped in a castle that's owned by a huge ogre of a monster. Er... wait a minute...

The first thing you'll notice in Powerstone 2 is that the levels are much more active than they were in the first game. There are so many things moving on the screen at once it's sometimes hard to keep track of what's really going on. Furthermore, the levels themselves change dynamically, often times with only the most subtle of hints to get you by. In one level, you find yourself on an airship with 3 gun turrets. These turrets are available to you to wreck havoc on everyone else in the game, but you need to be careful, since birds of prey can and will see that your reign of terror doesn't last as long as you would hope for. While you are battling it out on this airship, it will eventually blow up, leaving you to freefall in the sky for a short amount of time. The catch is that you are still able to fight while you are falling, as you battle it out to grab umbrellas to break your fall to the next level. The third part of this level is a fairly small battleground that contains a couple of catapults and a battletank. The other levels in Powerstone 2 are just as expansive and surprising as this one, ranging from battles on submarines to traditional Japanese castles.

The characters themselves contain just as much detail as they did in the first Powerstone game. Although the camera has been pushed back to accomodate 4 players fighting at once, it's clear that Capcom has pushed the graphical limits of the Dreamcast even further with Powerstone 2. All of the characters from the first game return, so you can assume the role of Gunrock, Fokker and everyone's favourite Goku wannabe, WangTang. There are four new characters to the game, including Pete, Gourmand the Iron Chef (actually he's not an Iron Chef... I just made that up), Accel the gunslinger and Julia the Mary Poppins wannabe. Accompanying these four new characters are two hidden characters as well as two new boss characters.

The gameplay remains more or less the same as the first Powerstone 2, which means this is a total free-for-all-anything-goes kind of fight. Gone are the diagonal jump kicks that bothered almost everyone who played the game. Now jump kicks are almost vertical, although they still can be exploited rather easily. Capcom added even more weapons for us to use in the game, including a megaphone, a bubble gun and a sonic gun. In total, there are over 120 weapons in the game for your disposal, and that's not including all of the vehicles you can ride, which include tanks, gun turrets and catapults. In the original, there were 3 Powerstones on the field which enabled you to transform into a more powerful and deadly version of your character. In Powerstone 2, you still need to collect 3 stones to transform, but there can be as many as 7 stones on the playing field at once. For those of you worried that Capcom might have changed the alternate versions of your favourite characters, fear not: everyone from the first game retains their original form. Where Powerstone 2 deviates from it's predecessor is the 4 player mode, which allows you and 3 of your friends to duke it out in a dizzying display that can only be described as absolutely insane.

The Dreamcast is slowly emerging as the machine to have if you like 'party' games. With games like Chu-Chu Rocket and Marvel vs Capcom, Sega's dream machine looks to take away the title of best multiplayer system away from Nintendo's N64. Powerstone 2 is just another step towards this realization. With it's great graphics and undeniably fun gameplay, Capcom continues their streak of innovative and extremely fun titles that only proves that the company is still at the top of their game.

· · · Reno