Urban Reign Review

This was one of the games I wanted to look into when hearing about lesser known "hidden gem" PS2 games for some time. Urban Reign was pretty high on the list, I finally decided to give it a chance and it really did manage to surpass my expectations. If you are a fighting game fan, a wrestling fan, a beat em up fan or just looking for a good game, Urban Reign delivers on all fronts. As far as 3D beat em ups concerning fist fighting and not using weapons as your primary means of attack are concerned, I'd say Urban Reign might be the best of the bunch.

What really separates Urban Reign from many 3D beat em up games that have combat like say God of War, Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden and Onimusha is that Urban Reign, you are primarily spent fighting enemies and bosses, no puzzles, no platforming, no backtracking in Urban Reign it's just 100 missions of Brad Hawk and his buddies getting into brawl after brawl, there is something really refreshing about the game's purity that makes it stand out from other games in the genre before and after. The game stands tall and is confident enough to stand on it's combat system, even similar games that released around the same time and became franchises like the Yakuza series relies on it's open world, mini games, production values, and story to be engaging more so than because of it's combat.

Might as well get the story out of the way here first, Urban Reign makes it abundantly clear that it's a low budget game, there's barely any cutscenes or much of the events of the story actually being shown, the most you get for context in the game is a bunch of narrated menus, that's pretty much it, but it highlights just yet again just how confident the game has in it's combat.

Another aspect of the game where the game shows it's lower budget side is the enviromnents or should I say fighting game stages because that's what they are they aren't even levels you explore these are just combat arenas where the fights take place and you will be fighting in the same 5-8 locales throughout the game so be warned if you are one of those people who dislike repetitive scenery in games.

The best way of describing Urban Reign is that it's a beat em up with the frame work of a fighting game. One thing you will notice right away is that the game is very much inspired by professional wrestling in the way the moves are performed and how Brad Hawk fights, sure he has his traditional fighting game attacks like low attack leg sweep, being able to juggle enemies in the air using his 3 hit combo while having special attacks like fast barrage punching and a powerful super punch, but there is a lot of wrestling moves in the game, one of the singnature attacks he can is a power bomb and while pressing the x button can turn into it a running power bomb. There's moves like running power slams, bulldogs, backbreakers and so on. If you are somewhat familar with pro wrestling much of UR's fighting system is inspired by it.

The actual combat mechanics consists of a variety of things, there is strikes, grapples, special attacks, reversals, and later on being able to run up walls and weapons too. The game pretty stressful and challenging, I played on easy but it seems to be that the easy mode was the intended normal since not only do the enemies can do all the things you can, they have the same amount of health as you do and preform the same moves as you can. Some good things UR does right off the bat is the game is mostly very good and never gets in the way, lock on works well and switching between targets isn't too complicated even though it can spazz out at times, switching between different enemies for no reason but I had less issues as the game went on. The game might be really be challenging at times but here is the thing UR does really well, it never ever wastes your time, fights are over very quickly much like bouts in a fighting game, and each mission is an indvidual fight meaning that if you die, not much progress is even lost since dying is like restarting a fight. Urban Reign is a challenging game that respects your time rather than doing so much content and getting past parts you already know how to do get past to the hard parts.

On top of this, you can get a partner to back you up during many fights and perform double team attacks like you see in tag team wrestling, and the best part is, for the most part if your ally lose all his HP, it's not a game over so it's a good assist feature and you aren't a babysitter.

A big thing I like about UR over many games with melee combat is that when you get staggered, it's not the end of the world, you can break out of grab moves if you time the presses of the square button right and you can break out of staggering animations by performing special moves.

The bosses can be pretty hard too, Naplam 99 and Golem being the top two and it gets annoying fighting them again and again which is the only major complaint I have. That and some of the mission involving you to damage body parts of different characters to progress but these missions can be over fast just be warned to check out the move list on buttons to press to attack specific body parts. 

Overall, I highly reccomend this game