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Watch any of the Dead or Alive fighting games, and you can't help but be impressed at the sheer audacious buxomness of their female leads. No surprise, then, that these fine ladies have spawned a spinoff series where they take a vacation to an idyllic beach island, with nothing to do except lounge about by the pool, play volleyball, and buy each other presents.
Like its Xbox predecessor, Dead or Alive Xtreme 2's volleyball sections are surprisingly good, but they're buried under a mound of irrelevant, boring, or downright frustrating gameplay -- and one of our favorite multiplayer functions is gone.
Is there some guy - and we're betting it's a guy - at Team Ninja who spends all his days writing boob physics routines? What does he say to his family when he gets home? "Hi honey, guess what? Today I spent eight hours making breasts jiggle in completely random directions!"? The Dead or Alive series has always earned attention for the "assets" of its female stars, but DOAX2 takes this to ridiculous extremes of self-parody.
Lurking in the options screen is an anonymous "age" slider that actually tweaks the response of the offending items, but you have to set it to 13 to get anything approaching a realistic effect. While it's not actually specified that this is supposed to be the age of the girls, and nobody would be silly enough to mistake DOAX2's ludicrously top-heavy stars for children, it's still enough to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
Maybe the boob physics guy and the hair physics guy should swap jobs. DOAX2's hair -which is supposed to bounce about all over the place - goes too far the other way, and ends up looking decidedly stiff and unnatural. Worse, it sometimes gets stuck in the characteristic staccato vibration that's the sign of a physics engine that's lost the plot altogether. On the whole, it's a mess.
For all that, you might be surprised to hear that the volleyball, core to the DOAX2 experience, is actually rather good. The controls are simple but responsive, the AI is passable, and sure, the eye candy is there. Volleyball offers by far the best gameplay of all, so it's odd that, if anything, Team Ninja has shifted its focus away from it and towards the more disposable sub-games. Shame.
Players of the original Xbox game will remember the hoops you had to jump through to partner up with one of the other girls. Yup, the same, critically flawed system is back, and you'll be buying all kinds of junky presents for each girl in an irritating quest to hit upon whatever might happen to be the right class of gift. Key to its shortcomings is that there's no feedback or clues as to what each girl likes - you're essentially throwing gifts into a vacuum. Without any way for players to get insight on the inner workings of the game, other than trial and error (or hitting up the cheat sites), making friends in DOAX2 is a frustrating experience.
Worse, if you get on a losing streak your partner will dump you, and if you don't have a replacement lined up you'll be spending a lot of time sitting on the beach. While you're there, if you buy a camera and some film, you can take pictures of your chosen character while she's sunbathing, roller-skating, working out, or doing whatever else ninjas do when they're not fighting or playing volleyball.
During these sequences, the player is a completely passive voyeur; there's no indication the girl knows you're there, and this creates a really unsettling impression. There are words for people who hang out at beaches taking pictures of sunbathing lovelies. Bad words. As if the rest of the game wasn't creepy enough.
Once the lure of photography loses its shine, you might want to check out some of DOAX2's daft minigames. Promising though "Butt Battle", "Tug of War" and "Beach Flags" might be, they add little to the game's appeal. Mostly they're tests of joypad dexterity combined with a healthy heaping of luck, and are far too shallow to be satisfying.
Jetski racing, another new addition, shows more promise, but the imprecise controls are frustrating and the odd-looking water takes the shine off the well animated character models. Still, you can pull off simple stunts with the right button combos, and pulling off a victory isn't too difficult (and comes with a decent pot of money, too). New jetski models are expensive, but come with bigger engines, better handling or turbos; it's certainly one of the new game's best additions.
Team Ninja has added Xbox Live functionality for the 360 version, allowing you to play both the volleyball and jetski race modes against online opponents. Oddly, the volleyball mode only supports two players - you'd think with four girls on the court all the time it'd be a no-brainer to support that many players. For some reason, we found lag to be a major issue, too. Sadly, and incomprehensibly, it loses the one-console volleyball multiplayer that was one of the original game's strongest features. Xbox Live play is no substitute for a proper two-player mode, especially as this was really the only time where the original game could stand on its own merits, not just the assets of its stars. Oh, and if you're the type to chase down every last achievement point you can, you'll loathe DOAX2's boring and over-difficult selection.
Despite its high-definition graphics, DOAX2 is a clear step backward from its Xbox predecessor. With a better focus on the original game's strengths it could have been something worth recommending, but if anything Team Ninja has headed in exactly the wrong direction: more throwaway minigames, the same frustrating friends system, less focus on the volleyball. Instead, it winds up seeming just as superficial as the bosoms of its stars.