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Deathrow Review - Xbox

When you enter a Deathrow tournament arena you are in the fight of your life. Combining rib breaking punches, brutal body throws and face crushing kicks all the time defending against a relentless bloodthirsty opposition. This is the kind of sport where the crowd shouts for a death, where injuring the opposition is something you look forward to and gives your team an advantage. To win you must either score as many points as possible during the time period, or by severely injuring your opponents by any means necessary. The fastest, toughest players are victorious and the slow and weak are defeated. Make no mistake you are in the fight of your lives. Win at all costs.

Deathrow provides gamers an alternative to what is otherwise a general sports genre. Many of the same titles get released every year with enhancements to their gameplay but no new games get released which are ground breaking in the sports genre market. Ubi Soft has decided to add another dimension to the sports genre with Deathrow.

Gameplay

The rules behind Deathrow are simple there are none. Deathrow pits you against the opposition in an arena four players on either side squaring off against each other ready to engage in a brutal contest. Each game consists of four rounds; combat is only 50% of Deathrow the other 50% consist of tactics and strategy to score points. There are two ways you can be victorious, either by smashing your opposition or by scoring more points than the opposition. The most effective way of assuring victory was a combination of both. Brutalise the opposition in offence then using strategy and moving the ball around the arena to score. If you’re ruthless you can also take out the opposing team with brutality and no remorse leaving their entire team injured and unable to compete. I also discovered they could use the same tactics against your team. More than once I found that I was getting injured and taken out with horrendous kicks to the head.

There are 13 teams to choose from within Deathrow all with their own styles, tactics and special moves. Each team has it's own capabilities there is a customization option to build you owns team, for your own style. Some teams are stronger, faster or combination of both. You can customise your team for your level of gameplay. If you want a running game then you would select the agile and faster players, where if you wanted a violent team you would choose the muscle enhanced gung ho kick ass characters. A combination of brute force and speed worked well, brute force for defence while speed and agility can be used effectively for scoring. If you are victorious you can repair and upgrade your players, which I found was necessary after taking a beating, including health, speed and power. By wining matches you also earned match prizes and money. Which can be used to upgrade ... (continued next page)