Platinum is good at what it does best

I was skeptical while approaching this game, although I have a lot of respect for Platinum I haven't found the idea of "multiplayer focused brawler" - awesome. This usually means - weak singleplayer mode, and I enjoy singleplayer in games.

The game starts by you selecting one of the 2 main characters: Jack or Leo.

And after a short tutorial you are thrown into the game world to fight and experiment. As always Platinum excels in gameplay department. The fighting system is simple to pick up and responsive (with small exceptions). You have a simple attack, strong attack and a grab move. Then you have a Special Weapon bar and a Rampage bar. Each one is filled by fighting and taking damage.

In special weapon mode - you unleash your weapon (double chainsaw for Jack and arm blades for Leo) for a couple of highly devastating blows.
In Rampage Mode you become almost invincible by being able to punch and kick with supersonic speeds (say hello to God Hand and Dragon Ball) rendering the enemies almost immobilized.

The advantage of the Fighting system is that it doesn't restrict you. Even when fighting with the bosses you can use your full arsenal of moves - which is awesome. During the boss fights you can unleash the Rampage mode against the boss - which brings you to a small minigame of "who pushes the buttons faster" - only this time the QTE's are actually fun.

The game has a nice learning curve, and you are able to grasp the controls before encountering with stronger enemies.

Now into the story department - there isn't much of it, and the one that is presented is silly.

The environments are uninspired, although the nice thing in these are the unexpected events that happened during fights. Like planes - that bombard the stage, toxic flower attacks - that drain your life, trucks - that rampage through the levels, typhoons - that can send you flying into the air.

The game wants you to fight random spawned enemies in the very very small open world. They attack in waves and grant you point after their defeat. After you reach a certain point limit you unlock secondary and main events. This might sound tedious - but you gain the points very fast.

Secondary missions are more focused and give you more points for unlocking events than by simply fighting through the open world. While the main missions throw you into a confrontation with the game's many bosses.

And there are a ton of bosses. This is one of the game's strong points - the bosses have great design, and are interesting to fight against. Furthermore some bosses have backup. This fact alone could bring frustration in form of cheap deaths from
the hands of the minions. Here - you receive some form of backup from the characters you have previously defeated or befriended. For these fights you can choose to play as the other characters that back you up - which spices up the game.

The main highlight of the game are the boss battles, which are plenty, with filler fights in between. The missions themselves don't show much diversity, even for a brawler. The fact that you finish the whole game without unlocking any new moves is also unimpressive. Especially taking into account that you don't have a lot o moves to begin with.

But for some reason, after finishing the story with one character - I immediately started playing the game from the beginning, through the same landscapes, although through an alternative story and with new bosses.

And even after seeing the unimpressive world, lack of story and character progression, no atmosphere.... I was still playing this game. Why? Simple - it was somehow fun. Even with all the minuses it's still fun. I can only imagine what could it become if Platinum would have received more funds for this project.

What can I say. I love Platinum games!