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   Company Hudson ESRB Rating E for Everyone Release Date US - January 14, 2008 Controllers Wii Remote Classic Controller Gamecube Controller Wii Points 800  Review by: Corbie Dillard ©2008 Virtual-Turbo |
Riot
Zone came along at a time when arcade beat 'em ups were extremely
popular titles. Capcom's Final Fight was easily the king of the genre
and Hudson obviously wanted to take advantage of the popularity by
releasing Riot Zone. Riot Zone took advantage of the CD medium by
incoporating CD quality audio into the game. What that meant was that
Riot Zone had a solid soundtrack, but the mediocre sound effects and
overly simple play control often overshadowed it. The result was
basically a decent Final Fight clone that never really offers up enough
playability to keep your attention for more than a few minutes.
NYPD officer Hawk's fiance has been abducted by the mob organization known as "The Dragon Zone." Hawk and his friend Tony set out to rescue her and bring down the Dragon Zone syndicate once and for all. You'll have to traverse 5 levels each with a boss at the end in order to reach your fiance. The game play in Riot Zone is fairly simple. You have an variety of attacks that vary depending on how close you are to the enemy and whether or not your on the ground or in mid-air. The more you continue to press the attack button the more combos you can pull off. You also have a special move that you can pull off by pressing both the attack and jump buttons at the same time that will unleash a fairly powerful attack that can hit any enemies that are within reach. If you've ever played any beat 'em up title, you'll feel right at home with Riot Zone. As you defeat the many enemies, you'll be allowed to proceed along the level until you reach the end where you'll take on one of the game's bosses. The boss fights are generally uneventful mainly because the bosses don't differ too much from all of the other enemies in the game. They're usually a little tougher to take out, but the AI in this game is pretty bad no matter what enemy you're taking on. The control in the game is generally solid and responsive, but there's just absolutely nothing new or unique about the game that makes it stand out. The entire experience just feels terribly bland and vanilla. Even the pacing of the game feels too sluggish most of the time. All of these things coupled together form a rather generic gaming experience. Visually Riot Zone is pretty solid. There's good detail in the many areas found throughout the game and even the backdrops show a lot of depth. The wide color palette also helps add to the detail of the levels and the characters and enemies are all well-drawn and animated. Sure a few more frames of animation would have been nice, but given the time period this game was released, the visuals are quite solid. The characters aren't as large as those found in Final Fight and the bosses are downright anemic in comparison. Since this is a CD title it would have been nice to have had some cutscenes throughout the game, but given that there's very little storyline going on anyway, it's not a huge loss. The soundtrack in Riot Zone is very good. It's not quite up to the standards set by some of the more impressive Turbo CD titles, but it's got a nice hard rock edge to it. The tunes show a lot of variety, but the below-average sound effects tend to bring the entire musical experience down a notch or two. The TurboGrafx-16's built-in sound chip was more than capable when in the right hands, but these were obviously not the right hands as most of the sound effects in this game are terrible. Many of them sound like nothing more than speaker distortion. It's obvious that these effects took a serious backseat to the CD soundtrack itself. In the end it's difficult to recommend Riot Zone when there are much better action titles available on the Virtual Console. This game wasn't terribly impressive even back when it was new for the TurboGrafx-16 system and it hasn't aged too well either. Unless you're just a diehard beat 'em up fan or like your control systems bare bones simplistic, then you might want to pass on this one. The TurboGrafx-16 CD system had some outstanding titles throughout its lifespan but unfortunately this wasn't one of them. |
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