Digimon Rumble Arena 2 (GameCube) Review

This is basically a fighting game, Digimon style. Sadly, this style doesn't come across very well on the GameCube as this title stutters, stumbles, stifles and slops towards what we suppose is meant to be a finished game. It isn't so much as this game is worryingly bad, it is playable (to an extent), it is just so painfully average, dull and unadventurous that it makes us wonder just one thing: why?

Obviously it will sell, but we are not here to celebrate that, we are here to tell you about the game, so on we must go. It doesn't start off to well, the menu system is fairly vile, the music will make you bludgeon your ears repeatedly until the pain stops and the random 'loading' times so the game can catch up with the complex icon menu system...odd. Why it needs to load so often when it looks so horrible we are not quite sure, but it might be something to do with the fact that it is possibly ported directly from the PS2 version...perhaps.

Graphically the main game is fairly shocking. Now, we do like our retro titles, but we don't like them disguised as modern ones. To say that this game sports 'N64-esque- graphics would be unkind to some N64 titles, it is painfully dull, painfully misshapen, painfully blocky, painfully full and painfully painful. Thankfully the gameplay is actually fairly amusing, but again provides nothing out of the ordinary. Fighting is simple enough, you can put together quite nice moves easily and all 40 Digimon (all with the ability to Digivolve into bigger and better beasts) have their own specific moves and super-powerful special attacks.

The variety is nice for a while, but soon you will realise that you don't really need to change your style of play from one character to the other, rendering any differences a bit useless beyond them 'looking pretty', and when you consider how this game looks, it all goes a bit tits up. Four Digimon can fight at once in a variety of 'exciting' arenas. Quite a few of them are interactive, which can make things quite interesting. There is one level that traps your Digimon into a can should you fall into a certain hole, whereas at other points you can fall off the level, get burnt or just simply disappear. Bits of scenery move, collapse and can be destroyed by attacks; all of which makes for something a little bit interesting.

The variety is nice for a while, but soon you will realise that you don't really need to change your style of play from one character to the other, rendering any differences a bit useless beyond them 'looking pretty', and when you consider how this game looks, it all goes a bit tits up. Four Digimon can fight at once in a variety of 'exciting' arenas. Quite a few of them are interactive, which can make things quite interesting. There is one level that traps your Digimon into a can should you fall into a certain hole, whereas at other points you can fall off the level, get burnt or just simply disappear. Bits of scenery move, collapse and can be destroyed by attacks; all of which makes for something a little bit interesting.