Outlaw Volleyball Remixed – Review

Our outlaw friends are heading back into town again, with yet another addition to the great outlaw series. This time we head back to Outlaw Volleyball (Released on Xbox 2003) with some twists and turns added, but in the comfort of our old favorite characters hands.

• Story/Gameplay
Outlaw Volleyball remixed follows the same formula as all previous Outlaw titles, (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing!). They take a sport, add scantily-clad males and females, add a touch of violence, some new concepts, and some dodgy one liners and voila a game is born.

What’s new from Outlaw Volleyball Remixed I hear thee ask, well at first the changes are not that apparent. There is a new character that you can unlock, but she was downloadable in the Xbox version. And apparently the real changes are in the controls which I have to say are far more sensitive than the original title but easy enough to use and get used to. The game uses a target system and power gauge to control the angle and power of shots. It’s actually quite difficult to miss a shot! Special moves are also far easier to undertake this time round. The other changes include 2 new game types, Ping-Pong and Baseball.

There are 13 different courts to unlock and play a variety of different game types on, including Classic, Hot Potato, Casino, Ping-Pong and Baseball. Classic is your classic volleyball rules, try and score a point against your opponents, Hot Potato introduces timings to the game, you must not be the last one to volley the ball over the net when the bar is full, otherwise you’re gonna get blown up! In the Casino game style you earn dollars for the points that you score, and the team with the most money wins that round. Ping-Pong follows the same point system of a ping pong game yet is played in the classic volleyball style. The Baseball mode works in the way of a normal Baseball game, with certain shots scoring a home run.

Outlaw Volleyball Remixed offers a great variety of gameplay, and you’ll have a lot of fun trying to beat your opponents. There are several different options at the start of the gaming including exhibition matches which is a straightforward volley ball game, random mode which is the same as exhibition mode although your characters are chosen for you. If you enter a Tournament and you win you unlock new content including characters, courts, new tournaments, and new garments. In the Drills mode you undertake training (mini-games) for each of your characters; here you can work on the various types of shots from your serve to your block and all the shots in-between. As you pass each training test, you are awarded stat points which you are able to use to improve your characters performance.

If at any point during your match you find that you’re getting frustrated with your opponent then why not beat them up? Yep that’s right, with the touch of a button you can take your opponent on in a Tekken style fighting match, without the special Tekken moves of course. None the less if you defeat them, then they will have less chance of carrying out special moves during the match as they lost momentum, and will have no boost to run for the ball, making the match an easy win. Of course you have to earn fight tokens, but this is done easily through a match by winning points.

The game also supports on-line play with a leader board, and up to 4 players can play in a match.

• Graphics/Environments
I can’t help but feel the graphics are outlaw’s main letdown. Even if the Playstation 2 is an inferior machine in terms of power, I’d never expect to see some of the graphical horrors that exist, especially in comparison to the greatly modelled Xbox version. Whilst it is unfair to compare the two, and also unnecessary, it has to be said that things just don’t look that great. Characters limbs and body parts suffer from bad clipping, where top parts of legs disappear into the torso, or where feet seem to merge with the sand. The frame rate also suffers, the camera can be very jittery at times – something which may get on peoples wick. (Although there are several options to change the camera angle, none seem to be as smooth as they could be). The courts are all set in different environments from a beach, to the sewers to prison, and each manages to create a feel for the environment that you are playing in.

• Sound/Deaf Gamer
The background noise is mostly made up of hip hop and techno licensed music tracks, along with crowd cheers. And then of course we have the commentator, Steve Carrell (The Office), who delivers his commentary with great gusto. Unfortunately if you have ever played Outlaw Volleyball on the Xbox then you will have heard every line that he comes out with several hundred times no doubt, thankfully there is an option to turn him off. The lines that he comes out with are crass, immature, and typical to the outlaw series, definitely able to raise a smile from me the first couple of times that I heard them, but as they get repeated so often they just become insanely annoying (Crazy Frog anyone?). Deaf gamers will certainly not be missing out on much here apart from the occasional early chuckle.

• Girl Gamer point of view
A lot of scantily-clad females with huge boobs, bouncing around hitting balls and celebrating points with as many innuendos as possible. It seemed Hypnotix were trying to target adolescent boys with this title. But hey, at least the ladies get the rather hunky El Suave!

• Summary
Great gameplay, with lots of content to unlock, not even the graphics or sound are enough to make you put your controller down. This is a highly addictive title which is great fun to play with a buddy or on your own, but with that said if you do have Outlaw Volleyball for the Xbox then don’t pay for this title, there is nothing outstandingly new to make another purchase.

A spiking 3.5 out of 5 for this addictive but flawed volleyball outing.

Review by Leyla

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment