Urban Reign

The grabber doesn’t lie. Urban Reign looks different, but play it for 30 seconds – no, just five seconds – and you will be amazed at what you’re seeing: a Tekken game that isn’t Tekken and a street fighter that isn’t a street fighter!

Since it’s a street fighter, weapons can be picked up and use against your opponents. Your environments can function as a weapon as well. Punch, kick, or shove an enemy into a construction vehicle and your opponent should receive more damage.

He certainly will look like he will. His body will hit the vehicle, bounce forward lightly and collapse, done in one well-animated motion. Since the construction vehicle can’t be directly used against your opponent, perhaps the best way to classify the environments would be to call them weapon assists.

Surprisingly, the gameplay is almost exactly the same as Tekken 4. There are slight changes in speed, and if a baseball bat is on the ground you can pick it up and use it. But the fighting moves – they’ve been taken right from the Tekken series. One guy moves exactly like Eddy Gordo, flipping in the same way and everything. Namco must’ve used the same motion capture actor, or used the same motion capture data. Otherwise I don’t think they would have been able to re-create the character.

Other characters have familiar punches, grab moves, combos. Very little is 100%, which seems to be the point. This is intended to be an alternative to Tekken, but the developers didn’t want to make it so vastly different from that series that people were turned off. So they took everything you know about the series and threw it into a thug-filled world.

Will this turn out to be an effective way to design a fighting game? No one will know for certain until the game is released this fall.

For All E3 2005 Previews