Drakengard

Send in the Clones

This action doesn't usually let up for at least half an hour per level, and the game offers around 13 chapters packed with multiple missions. If all you crave is fierce pounding of sword against clone warrior armor, then go knock yourself out. In fact, later into the game, you probably will knock yourself out after completing a 45 minute slaughter-thon, reach a new enemy type, and learn how to beat them just after you lose a life and have to replay the entire mission; the further you progress in the game, the more frustratingly difficult to ascertain the enemies' weak points becomes, so watch for that.

Enemies continuously arrive until you reach a specific target point, after which Caim broods some more, and the action shifts to another slash-and-dash through countless offal-filled foes, or switches to one of the other two gameplay modes. Later into the game (and we mean hours later; this game takes at least 20 of them to trek through), your enemies begin to become more and more freakishly weird, but still appear in cloned groups. Diversity isn't this game's strong point.

About 45 minutes into your game, you're introduced to your partner in this seemingly endless hacking, a giant and majestic dragon. She starts off nailed to the ground, in one of the game's few stunning real-time graphical renderings; most of the time your environments are gigantic, but constructed of repeated stone and earth textures with spartan scenery and numerous "invisible walls" to annoy you. You can't move over anything taller than your ankle. You don't even get to see your hero walk up stairs! But back at the dragon's courtyard, you'll enter into a pact with your scaly friend, and in return for riding the beast during around a third of the game's Panzer Dragoon-inspired stages, Caim receives a magical tattoo on his tongue, preventing him from speaking.

Alas, if only the dragon had received this curse; the voiceover artist for the lizard sounds like Judge Judy, and as everyone knows, all dragons are supposed to sound like Sean Connery. The rest of the audio? Music is classically-inspired Teutonic marching romps. The vocal styling ranges from overly melodramatic twee English chaps lamenting life ("you cannot live on hatred alone") to mistranslated bollocks ("when I look into their eyes, somehow … yarrg!") There's also a fairy (sorry, I mean Faerie) with a horrifically out-of-place valley girl drawl. Depending on how your tolerance is for amateur theatrics, you'll find the speech and script bearable, or conniption-inducingly atrocious. Once the setup is out of the way you'll find the story is actually quite unusual and twisted, so check it out if that's your sort of thing.

Fly the Unfriendly Skies

But all this gets in the way of the killing. Interspersed with the ground hacking, is airborne dragon-flapping, where you'll really learn to appreciate the sweeping majesty of Drakengard's skyward sections pale in comparison, with only a multiple fireball attack and a "kill the squadron of ornate flying cubes" banzai attack, with a large white arrow leading you everywhere. The third gameplay feature is an amalgamation of flying and on-foot slashing, where you strafe enemies with flame, then drop off and finish the leaders.

Fiery death is your best friend.

The dragon is particularly bad at banking turns during these phases, and you'll scrape around invisible walls with the aerodynamic splendor of a plummeting whale. Best get on the ground, and get back to the hacking; there's treasure chests to find, containing a key or a new weapon. Find all 65 weapons, and build each of the weapons through all four stages of power, and you'll have more patience than David Blaine in a perspex box. These elements, however, and a cursory gathering of party members, are the "RPG" portions of the game in all their mislabeled glory.

Dynasty Warriors 4 does the ground fighting with more variety and interest. Panzer Dragoon Orta takes to the skies with more spectacular success. But Drakengard has both aspects melded into a confusingly epic game including numerous side-quests and dozens of sharp pointy objects to thrash about with. Got a spare 20 to 30 hours, and a hankering for mindless medieval bloodshed? Not been pressing the Square button enough? Go on -- give this an intense weekend rental.