- 1-8 Players.
- Arcade Mode.
- Theme Park Mode.
- Party Mode and Endurance Mode.
Product description
-------------------
If you went BANANAS over the original Point Blank, you'll go APE
over the sequel! Point Blank 2 is everything you loved about the
original, but this time it's even better. Loaded with over 70
all-new wild-and-crazy shooting scenarios, Point Blank 2 is so
much fun you won't be able to put your con down!
Review
------
If you've ever played the arcade version of Namco's Point Blank
(or Bullet, as it's called in Japan) or the import version
for the PlayStation, then you likely know just how many tokens
you can go through or how many restarts you initiate in a very
short a of time. This puzzle/shooter title, which sometimes
unmercifully lets you have only one bullet and five seconds to
complete a task, can be replayed free, endlessly, and to
perfection, as it's now available for the Sony PlayStation - in
English.
Point Blank portrays the story of two -slinging companeros and
adventurers, Dr. Don and Dr. Dan, who look amazingly like Sesame
Street's Bert and Ernie after a y dose of Rogaine and about
20 years hard time. You adopt their collective identity
throughout the single-player and two-player head-to-head
score-battle mode. Once you select your experience level,
beginner, intermediate, or expert, get comfortable with and
calibrate your Con, as this is the third US title to be
compatible with the accurate-within-three-pixels light . From
this point, a jumble of four distinct challenges from within a
larger grouping will be presented to you. Select one of them, and
the game starts.
There's no logical progression to the difficulty of these levels,
as they each tend to measure a different skill set. Some of them,
for example, test your accuracy by giving you a single bullet and
ten seconds to shoot an apple off a guy's head or blast a feather
floating down from the sky. The expert level may find you trying
the same task with less available time or perhaps an object
moving more quickly. Other stages may test your speed and
judgment - making you shoot scores of "bad guys" or ninjas within
a given time limit. You'll have unlimited ammo on these levels,
but rapid fire won't help you. You see, there are civilians you
must avoid, or you'll lose a life for each one you kill. And
generally, unless you change things around in the options menu,
you only live thrice. Another grouping of levels encourages rapid
fire. In these challenges, you'll have a varying time limit and
an unlimited a of ammunition to either do such things as
totally destroy a sports car or shoot a bunch of bottles off the
wall. Still another skill test is the target objective. Marks in
the pattern of plates or shooting-range forms will be displayed
to you, and you'll have a time limit and occasionally an ammo
allotment to complete your goal. For example, you must shoot down
all plates of a certain color, while avoiding "bomb" decoys, or
hit a bull's-eye to secure a high score.
You won't always be reaching for a numerical score rewarding
target accuracy or destroying the appropriate number of objects.
You'll also have puzzles and missions to conquer - with your
(who said violence couldn't solve problems?). This might entail
shooting the keys of a keyboard to spell out words; figuring out
which part of the fast-moving Chinese dragon to hit; determining
which bouncing balls to cap to clear the lot of them; shooting
out a numerical sequence from a scrambled keypad; annihilating
all the vultures, piranhas, tanks, meteorites, and fireballs
before they exterminate your buddy; and knocking the hives off a
tree before killing all the bees. And if after all this you
haven't had enough diversity, various Whack-a-Mole-style levels
will prompt you to shoot cuckoo clock birds and fuzzy animals as
they emerge and disappear - rather quickly - in and out of their
abodes, tag-teaming with bombs that will tempt your anxious
reflexes.
The stages are incredibly irresistible and fun, luring you into a
seemingly endless stream of continues until you either succeed at
a challenge or get a red for that level and move on to the
next. If you fail, you'll lose one life and continue with the set
until you're dead. Whether you win or lose a level, you'll get a
certain number of points for how hard you tried (or how long you
managed to stay alive). Once you finish four levels, you'll get
four more until you either die or the difficulty level is
complete - at which point, you fight the final battle and
disappear into a flurry of fireworks and adulation when you win.
Single-player and head-to-head score competitions aside, Point
Blank for the PlayStation tops the arcade version by offering
tournament and team-play modes, in which up to four players
compete in turn-based rounds of the previously listed levels
until either a team or an individual wins. A special mode offers
variations on the already disparate stages, and a quest mode
extends RPG-like play - much in the style of Soul Blade, where
you (as the team of Dr. Dan and Dr. Don) collect experience
points and money for battles you encounter as you wander around a
tropical oasis called Point Blank Island. The point of this quest
is to beat Quickbuck, the evil head of the Scrimp 'n' Save
Corporation, to the ball. You do this by succeeding at a
series of shooting challenges, basically variations on the stages
from other modes, and you encounter them as you explore a 2D
environment. Quest mode is definitely a fast-moving RPG, but it
pretty much has to be, as who wants to hold his arms poised to
shoot for hours on end? The translations in quest mode are a
little rough, too, as you're told to "best" certain bosses, not
"beat" them, as well as test your "shoothing" skills. But this is
not a puzzle game disguised as an RPG, as the RPG standards, such
as purchasable rejuvenating potions (in the form of hamburgers,
here) and stepped-up weapons and so on, are all components of the
Point Blank Quest.
Point Blank's graphics are nothing to chirp about, and the music
sounds like it comes from a kid-weary shopping-mall floor-sample
synthesizer. But amazingly, Namco's managed to capture and apply
the addictive elements of puzzle and shooting games, creating a
title that is so enjoyable and difficult to put down you won't be
bothered by the audiovisual shortcomings. --Lauren Fielder
--Copyright ©1999 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction
in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written
permission of GameSpot is prohibited. GameSpot and the GameSpot
logo are trademarks of GameSpot Inc. -- GameSpot Review
