Electricman 2

A seamless brawler with outstanding gameplay

Reviewed by DFox from orangefoxgames.com

Electricman 2 by DX interactive grasps the platform-brawler genre by the horns and doesn’t let it go in any aspect of the superb gameplay and overall game.

The premise of the game is simple. You play the action-packed role of an electicman who must go from level to level hand combating a wide variety of interesting enemies. The controls in the game are easy to remember, intuitive, and take very little time to get the hang of. The arrow keys are used to move your character and the down arrow does a cart-wheel like move that can be used to maneuver away from enemies running after you quickly. Next, you have the normal attack keys, “a”, “s”, and “d”. Each calls a different one of your moves which are a kick, punch, and one where you can actually throw an enemy in the air. Lastly, you can use the “q”, “w”, and “e” keys to spawn a slow motion attack that does some major damage on the targeted enemy or enemies. Your character has a rechargeable battery which determines what attacks you can do. For instance, if you use a powerful slow motion attack, you lose a lot of battery. If you try to do another slow motion attack right after, you can’t because you need to wait for your battery to recharge.

The thing that makes Electricman 2 such a superb game is foremost its outstanding gameplay. First, one of the most important things in a brawler game like this is responsive controls. This game offers very responsive controls that keep the game flowing great, and allow you to complete the moves you want to efficiently. One of the great things about the actual moves you can do is the fact that doing a move while not moving will have a different result that hitting the same key while moving. Another part of the gameplay that puts this game over the top is its superb AI (artificial intelligence). The AI just seemed as close to perfect as AI can be in this genre. First, even on the “easy” difficulty setting, you can by no means just press one button the whole time and beat up the competition. Not only is the AI sound for the places the enemies move, I found it awesome when the enemies were actually ducking from my kicks. I loved the little things that were incorporated such as the fact that when you throw an enemy up in the air, he can come down on you, causing damage, or come down on another enemy and actually help you.

The game is organized into rounds which each contain a certain amount of battles. When you start the game, you choose a difficulty (easy, medium, or hard). In each round, you must win every battle in order to advance to the next round. I found that each battle had great differentiation because of the wide selection of different types of enemies. Not only were the enemies different, some actually had different features. For instance, robotic enemies auto healed themselves. The great thing about the levels is that in order to successfully beat some of them you actually need a strategy and you can’t just rapidly hit buttons. For example, in a level with auto healing robot enemies, I found a good strategy was to focus on damaging one and then the next. This adds a whole additional element to the brawler and makes it more fun. Another thing that added to the value of the game was the wide assortment of backgrounds in each level. The overall graphical element of the game is good. Although your character and the enemies are sticks, they are well done and all of the moves are smooth flowing.

Although there is nothing bad enough in the game that affects the actual gameplay its self, I do have some complaints. My first issue was with the “saving” feature. This game is entirely progress based. You go through each round and try to beat the final one. The saving method that is implemented is one in which after beating a level, you get a code that you need to save in your own text file, manually. Not only is this annoying, it was completely unnecessary. Flash offers a cookie-based file saving system where these codes could have easily be saved behind the scenes on the users computer to avoid the user actually ever having to see the code or enter anything in order to continue the game. It’s beyond me why this saving feature wasn’t taken advantage of in such a great game. The sound was great and the music was good, but I would have loved to see an option to turn it off or at least some kind of setting. Although the graphics are good, they are turned down to low quality automatically. It’s perfectly understandable because the game runs like a charm, speed-wise, but I feel they could have been optimized a little to look better at that low quality setting in Flash. My last issue was the one gameplay mode which is the single player story-like mode. It would have been really cool if the author included a multiplayer mode that you could play with someone on the same computer, or some type of additional off-beat mode.

Overall, Electricman 2 is outstanding. Its smooth flowing graphics and awesome gameplay get the job done in a stylish fashion and greatly overshadow the small problems that I cited above. The 3 skill levels available in the game provide a nice amount of replay value that will allow you to get used to the gameplay and even give yourself a great challenge.

Click here to play Electricman 2






Comments (5) [view all]

  Latest comment left by DFox:

Ah, I see. Well, I just checked it out, and it does have some pretty significant changes.  It actually addressed a lot of the faults I mentioned in my review. With that said, I think it's too soon to do a review on it.  Maybe I will down the road though.

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