What with the global wars and poisonous munitions, humanity’s made a toxic wreck of the future, but don’t expect a preachy lesson in peace and love. Instead, Anarchy Reigns turns the ruins into post-apocalyptic brawling arenas, and fills them with the likes of Molotov-tossing psychopaths, angry robots, and howling, lizard-like mutants.
The two simple-minded testosterone junkies who pass for protagonists in the single-player campaign are chasing the same man across the wastelands, and you’ll start out by deciding whose journey to follow first. That choice makes little difference: the story is an aimless and incoherent mess either way, albeit one told with a lot of colorful and occasionally amusing cutscenes. But when you’re not marveling at bizarre pyrotechnics or staring at chatty talking heads, you’ll roam hub stages packed with foes.
Grab a street sign and start swinging, slugger!You’ll bash through them using lock-on targeting and simple combinations of light and strong attacks, or hold down the left trigger as you attack to bisect and aerate fools with your current “Killer Weapon.” Most of the time that means either Jack Cayman’s double-bladed chainsaw arm or Leo’s deadly blades. But occasionally you can choose to rumble using temporary substitutes, like a slender woman who commands deadly hovering spikes, or a burly government thug with Tesla coils for gauntlets.
You’ll get comfortable with the controls easily enough, and the gleefully over-the-top carnage is fun to watch for a while, but Anarchy Reigns’ core button-pounding gameplay is repetitive in the extreme. To make matters worse, you’re forced to unlock every mission by grinding for points, which always means playing the same dirt-simple side missions over and over again. Every great now and then you’ll get one that lets you tear around a racetrack on an oversized jet ski with a bolted-on flamethrower, or escort a robot through streets choked with thugs. But mostly you’re stuck having to painstakingly carve through waves of enemies within aggravating and arbitrary time limits, or to just rack up as many kills as possible. If your efforts don’t measure up, you’ll find yourself unceremoniously dumped back into the world with no forward progress at all.
Occasionally you’ll get to dangle from a machine-gunning and missile-launching helicopter drone.Your reward for enduring all this monotonous button-mashing and crowd-smashing? Access to a series of story-mission showdowns against super-powered goons like a squealing pig-man and a bounty hunter with a cannon for a leg. If only the difficulty didn’t rubber-band between cakewalk and torture test, and a too-close camera didn’t leave your backside constantly exposed, meeting such ridiculous personalities might almost be worth the trouble. Thankfully, multiplayer is an entirely different experience. Here you’ll take all the outlandish characters you unlocked during the campaign into 11 kinds of online battle. (If you prefer — and you will — you can unlock those same characters by earning online experience.) Instead of getting only the rare break from carving and pounding using Jack and Leo, you’re now free to explore the talents and combo attacks of 16 different warriors, including a katana-wielding ninja and a Transformer-like robot.
Newfound variety isn’t limited to the choice of combatants, either. If you’re in the mood for some mindless mayhem, you can join one-onone cage matches, four-player deathmatches, and 16-player every-nutjob-for-himself Battle Royales where just keeping track of the action takes considerable concentration. As if pickups like rocket launchers, shields, and electrical traps weren’t enough, every now and again a dark-purple singularity will erupt to suck up and teleport players, or a poison-gas attack will turn the whole neighborhood into a coughing clinic.
Rin Rin wields a pair of deadly fan blades.And as frantic fun as such chaotic melees are, they pale in comparison to the more offbeat offerings. Tag Battles pit four two-person teams against each other, and emphasize brutal team attacks that let one fighter hold a target in place while the other mercilessly whales on the poor dope. Capture the Flag diverts some attention from combat, but a three-way version encourages unofficial ad hoc partnerships that could dissolve at any inopportune moment. Meanwhile, Death Ball turns a game of kill-the-carrier into an unpredictable fumble-fest where a well-timed pass or charged kick can always turn the tide.
The three-player Survival Mode doesn’t fare as well, as any decent team can easily make it to Round 10, at which point a pair of ludicrously overpowered mutants will almost certainly end the match. You’d also expect the selection of unlockable special abilities such as enhanced dash speed and increased charged-attack damage to have considerably more impact on the battlefield than they do. But when $30 nets you this much online-multiplayer insanity, it’s easy to forgive many of Anarchy Reigns’ missteps. Heck, at that price, you can ignore the grueling solo campaign entirely and the game’s still a decent value.
Paralyzed? Wiggle the thumbstick and mash buttons, quick!
PUBLISHER: Sega • DEVELOPER: PlatinumGames • ESRB: Mature • Multiplayer: Up to 16 on Xbox Live • ACHIEVEMENTS: Rote • COST: $30 • RELEASE DATE: January 8, 2013
+ Hugely enjoyable multiplayer modes, populated by 16 weirdos with unusual weapons.
+ Intuitive controls make crazy combos easy to do; $30 price; can play multiplayer offline with bots.
– Repetitive solo grind; poor difficulty-balancing; meager upgrades in multiplayer; camera woes.
? How’d Jack get such giant arms?
