WarTech: Senko Ronde for Xbox 360 Reviews by Gamers

Let's get this out of the way first. This game deserves two different reviews. One for the game itself (originally a Japanese arcade game), the other for it's delivery to America.

The game itself is actually a load of fun for the small handful of people that it's intended for. If you like fighting games (Street Fighter and the like), shoot-em-ups (Ikaruga, Raiden, etc.), and your main way of playing games is competitively against other people and not so much against the computer (usually something that goes hand-in-hand with fans of fighting games), then this game may very well be for you. One basic example of this game would be if Geometry Wars had some sort of 1 vs 1 battle mode with a lifebar.

Graphically, the game isn't the best. It looks like it could've been done on an XBox or GameCube with little to no trouble. But for fans of purely competitive games, graphics usually take a backseat to deep competitive gameplay, and this has that. Single player, however, will wear out quickly, as it will with most any game designed for competitive play (fighting games come to mind). Sound and music aren't bad, though everything is in Japanese and you don't really bother to read when you're dodging 2,430 bullets. Controls are solid, though take a bit to get used to. Which comes to the second part of this review.

This game has some of the worst presentation I've seen. It reminds me of one other awesome game that had bad presentation: Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. The lack of tutorial mode in a game with so much depth makes any newcomer view the game as straight-up button mashing garbage. Imagine Soul Calibur or Tekken with no movelist and no one around to give you an idea on what you're doing. Ultimately you're down to only trial-and-error or just mashing the controller and hoping that's enough to do something. Coupled with a $60 price tag when it first came out (now it's like 10 or less) and you can see why people hate it.

Game = 7 or 8. Presentation = 2.

It's really hard to put my finger on this game. It's not really "bad", I just didn't really like it. Other people have complained that it doesn't make any sense or that they have no idea how to even play the game. If that's true, how can you accurately review it? Basically, this is the most Japanese a game can get on the 360: it's anime-styled, it's subtitled, and it's... for lack of a better word, "quirky". It's a top-down shooter styled like a fighting game. It's just really... weird. There's a certain type of person that would absolutely LOVE this game, but I'm not one of those people. I can't really fault it for that, though, and just say it's a bad game. People don't seem to understand that there's a difference. The biggest problem I have with this game is that it's still a $60 game when it is nowhere NEAR worth $60. This game would fare much better if it was $39.99 like Earth Defense Force, as it's about on par with that game as far as production values go.

So where does that leave us? Well, if you consider yourself to have "unique" tastes or find that you often like stuff that nobody else that you know likes, maybe this is the perfect game for you. Try this game. If you don't like it, the only thing you'll be losing is the turnaround time it takes for Gamefly to get you a new game.