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Mobile Light Force 2 review

Game: Mobile Light Force 2
Platform: PlayStation 2
Genre: Shooter
Developer: Alfa System

Reader review by sclemmons

June 08, 2005

Mobile Light Force 2 is one of those cheesy ‘bullet’ shooters that come along, do absolutely nothing new with the genre, and are only remembered for bombarding the player with an unimaginable number of, well, bullets. That’s probably because shooters like this don’t really have much to hang their hat on, so the developers use an incessant barrage of red and purple lasers as means to supplant actual game play. You know, making the game enjoyable or trying to do something new isn’t a concern of the game developers it seems; the main concern is making the game a testing ground for one’s ability to dodge. But they do manage to succeed on that level! Bravo to them! The only real problem is: mostly everything else is laughable.

The good? MLF2 (a dubious abbreviation, as one nicely placed ‘I’ could spell disaster) doesn’t do entirely everything wrong. The standard shooter storyline is in place here: the world is in grave danger, and you, the all mighty hero of the universe (let us not understate your role here,) must pick one of six characters to save it from its impending doom. Each character is fundamentally the same, but they differ in way they their regular attacks, super attacks and charge attacks are executed. They all move across the screen in a quick, dancing motion, and they all have a total of three hits before dying. However, for the super attack, one character may be able to summon up a powerful beam capable to destroying all enemies on the screen while another one may just be able to turn into a wolf and crush all the nearby baddies. Some of these aforementioned ‘charge’ attacks allow one to move at half the speed, but do a considerable amount more damage than regular attacks, but far less than the super ones. These six different characters with totally different attacks should be enough to whet any seasoned shooter’s appetite

The bad: once you get your character choice all under control, Mobile Light Force 2 starts you off rather… oddly. During some random escapade over the cityscape at night, giant teddy bears and spinning Cinderella dolls start to attack you. Teddy bears seem to float effortlessly off the ground as they slowly make their way down the screen. Soon enough, once one would be thinking they were about to have a veritable tea party with the games bizarre cast of enemies, things start to heat up. Bullets begin to flood the screen in lame shooter fashion, making it nothing more than a host for shooter aficionados to show their skills to the less coordinated. For the rest that are not able to dodge for their life, I offer you his piece of advice: do not bother. Mobile Light Force 2 inundates the screen so much later in the game, even the deftest start to fall to ‘cheap deaths.’ Situations will arise in which you will not be able to escape, no matter how great you may be. Finding yourself stuck in one of these situations is frustrating, and takes away whatever potential fun the game had. For people not so skilled, the first few levels will be challenging; to those experienced with these types of shooters, the latter levels will still claim a few lives.

Compounding with this is that the bosses are a huge let down, and the terrible, downright atrocious voiceovers will leave you wondering why they even bothered to port such a game over seas with the jarred and disjointed English translations intact. Some bosses protest vehemently, “You can never destroy me!” and “Inconceivable!” the whole duration of the battle. Of course, these oh-so intimidating one-liners are acted out by what sounds like prepubescent Japanese kids that just got done doing work outs on a stationary bicycles. Even some of the text has misplaced words and/or conspicuous grammatical errors (probably much like this review). All the stage bosses also happen to be just regular people; no gigantic monsters with fifteen heads and a flaming tail to do battle with. While there are mini-bosses and they’re more in this vein of giant monster with fifteen heads and flaming tail, their patterns are so absolutely easy to find, one will have no trouble breezing past them; it’s the stages that claim lives. Furthermore, there are no grand melodies for us to rock out to while flying through the levels. Just some cheesy loop that’s repeated over and over again. From a shooter standpoint, MLF2 does only a few things right: multiple characters and allowing another friend to join in on the fun (if one would call it that). The bad: having terrible bosses, lame music and uninspired mini-bosses well outweigh the good. Mobile Light Force 2 is a $15 dollar game that plays every bit like its price tag.

Rating: 3/10

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