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One of the best looking Xbox 360 games is also one of the shallowest. Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 has its priorities straight: it wants to give you ten attractive girls to play around with, watch relax and be friendly to one another, and dress in skimpy outfits. This is really what you’re getting with the game, and if this is what you were looking for, you’re bound to be extremely pleased. If you are looking for a bona fide gameplay experience, your time will be best spent elsewhere.
The premise of DOAX 2 is that Zack, one of Dead or Alive’s most eccentric characters, invites the girls to Zack Island for the fifth Dead or Alive tournament. This is obviously a lie and the girls find themselves in a beautiful island with some time to waste. It would be a shame to go back so they decide to stick around for two weeks.
The first thing you do is pick the girl you play as. The lineup includes Kasumi, Hitomi, Leifang, Ayane, Lisa, Christie, Tina, Kokoro and Helena. You’re given basic information on each girl (like favorite color and food) which will come in handy when you want to give them gifts. Although you’re given a partner when you arrive on the island, you’re free to woo others with gifts. The game gives you limited feedback as to how much the other girls like you. You can somewhat tell given the feedback they give you when you give them a gift but that’s about it. With this new girl of yours, you can play volleyball, relax, or be friendly with other games at any of the game’s beaches, shop for different things at one of the three shops, or participate in a Jet Ski race at the marina.
In some ways it seems that the above is the focus of the game and the minigames are just necessary in order to buy swimsuits and woo new friends. The two main minigames are volleyball and marina race. The volleyball is fairly simple with basic movement, serving and spiking options. The marina race is the most satisfying out of the bunch. Think Wave Race with a more limited number of courses and you have the right idea. You have to race around laps, try to get boosts by racing in between the buoys, and pull off basic tricks on the water and when you’re in the air. These are complemented by some lighter minigames. These include pool hopping (where you have to hop from one floating square to another), tug of war (pull harder than the other girl), waterslide (slide down as quickly as possible without falling), sprint (press buttons quickly to sprint across the beach), and butt battle (where you have to evade the other girl bumping her butt on you while making sure you hit her).
Playing through the 14-day vacation with one girl will take a few hours. It’ll take much longer than that if you want to unlock all of her swimsuits and items (which you need to do—at least for one girl—to unlock the Virtual Pictorial mode where you can take Maxim-like pictures of the girls). If you replay the game with the same girl, you’ll have access to her collected swimsuits and items, as well as her cash supply. The game has a number of Xbox 360 achievements which are directly related to how many swimsuits you have for each girl. Completionists will fall crazy in love with this aspect of the game, while everyone else will just end up crazy.
Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 includes Xbox Live support. You’ll find two-player volleyball and four-player marine races available. The game supports online leaderboards and ranked and unranked matches. The online mode isn’t particularly deep but it works reasonably well. We did find noticeable lag when playing volleyball, although the marina race was problem-free.
The game’s graphics are undoubtedly the highlight of the game and some of the finest on the Xbox 360. The graphics engine uses an enhanced version of the Dead or Alive 4 engine. All of the girls look great (speaking purely in a technical sense here) and move fluidly. They even tan and you can see tan lines if you switch their swimsuit. One of the biggest changes to the graphics is the revised breast physics which let each breast move independently. Although it is often over the top, it never looks bad and there are times when the benefit is obvious. The relaxed, beach environments in the game also look stunning. The water in the game looks great whether you’re sitting by the poolside or playing butt battle in the pool, but the waves look amazing when you’re playing a marina race. The only thing that keeps the graphics from being perfect is that the hair looks fake since it seems to move in ribbon-like strands and sometimes clips.
The audio is also impressive although not to the same degree. The soundtrack is largely comprised of cheese pop like Hilary Duff’s Sweet Sixteen (theme song to the MTV show of the same name) and some exotic songs that give the game an authentic Caribbean vacation feel. The sound effects in the game are about what you would expect and sound pretty good. The voice acting is pretty good and particular effort was made to make sure the girls added just a bit of innuendo to whatever they say.
If you’re interested in a deep gaming experience, you have to look elsewhere. If you want to spend hours ogling virtual girls, buying them swimsuits, making friends with other girls and the like, Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 is exactly what you wanted. Nothing in the game is particularly broken, it’s just extremely hard to justify the game’s $60 price when most people still stop playing after 2 or 3 hours. With that said, it's easy to spend 40 or 50 if you want to collect everything. -- Jake Wilson, PGNx Media
---- Nov 25, 2006
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