Sword of the Berserk: Guts' Rage (Dreamcast)

When you think of the most recent attempts at bringing Final Fight's 2D gameplay to the 3D realm, you probably think of games like Dynamite Cop, Zombie Revenge, and Fighting Force. You'd be forgiven if you think those games get really boring fast, because they do. Well, Eidos and developer Yuke's (Evil Zone, WWF SmackDown!, and Soukaigi) have joined forces and taken one of Japan's most popular mangas, Kentauro Miura's Berserk, and turned it into the bloodiest hack 'n' slasher yet. Renamed Sword of the Berserk: Guts' Rage for the US, Eidos, surprisingly has picked up the game for American distribution.

Guts, the poorly-named main character, typically wields a massive sword nearly one and a half times his own body length, and as the game's title indicates, Guts has a tendency to go berserk once he has suffered enough damage during battle. At the moment he goes berserk, the screen turns blood red, and Guts' speed and power double. Guts is a one-eyed knight traveling through Europe during the Middle Ages. He is identifiable by his one working eye and a dark brand on his neck, which attracts the weird and varied creatures he continuously battles. When creatures are close at hand, the strange mark bleeds, giving Guts warning of impending danger.

The game begins with a scenario, rendered by the game's impressive engine, where some of the game's main characters are introduced beside their broken caravan. They are suddenly attacked by highwaymen looking for trouble, and that's when Guts enters the scene. You'll figure out the controls in no time flat. Aside from swinging your giant sword, you can jump, block, and even sheath your sword in favor of a wrist-sized crossbow.

You also have a limited supply of items that you can access by pressing the right trigger button and any of the corresponding four colored controller buttons. The items you can use are grenades, a small gun, health refills, and throwing knives. While these items are extremely limited, you can find them in the many boxes and barrels placed around the game environments. Once acclimated to the controls, you'll find that Sword of the Berserk is a straightforward hack 'n' slash action game where you rely on little more than your basest survival instincts. Chop the enemy to bits and try not to get chopped yourself. That's it. You are amidst an endless swarm of soldiers, monsters, and mutated thingamajigs, and your singular goal is to hack, hack, hack your way through the assembled masses. When you're not hacking these guys to bits, you're engaging in fisticuffs or blowing the attackers to tiny pieces with your grenades. Musket shots are best reserved for the bosses, since ammo is in limited supply. Unlike recent Final Fight-style games like Dynamite Cop, Zombie Revenge, and Fighting Force 2, Berserk doesn't ever get nearly as tedious. In Berserk, you'll run from level to level through a gamut of alleys, mountainsides, and villages. While some areas are wide open, others are restricted to tight spaces, which will cause your sword to clang off the walls. While you're in berserker mode, this doesn't affect you, but any other time this can be very difficult, especially with lots of enemies around you. When this happens, resorting to your fists is the best choice, as it's much easier to make contact this way. If you're cornered, a grenade will always clear everyone in the immediate area out like a smart bomb.

You'll meet bosses in unique encounters, and each will require a different strategy. One boss, for example, is a huge, man-bull creature with one enormous horn protruding from his head. This is one of the hardest bosses to defeat in the game because his patterns aren't as predictable as some of the others, and he is possibly the most mobile. You'll need to use every attack you know to beat him on the harder difficulty levels.

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