Guilty Gear 2: Overture Critic Reviews

Guilty Gear 2: Overture has a lot of good ideas and offers some entertaining gameplay moments, just not enough to warrant a purchase for most consumers.

If you want to see an action/RTS hybrid that actually gets the strategy part right, then Guilty Gear 2: Overture will deliver the goods. Unfortunately, even though this one element is great, it’s the only gem that stands in this title.

The suspect RTS elements, when combined with the premium price tag, make it hard to recommend Guilty Gear 2: Overture as a release-day purchase.

With crawling load times and a story that reeks of awkward Japanese translation, a glance should be all you give this game.

But the gameplay is unnecessarily complicated, with the busy HUD being the worst example.

At first, you feel overwhelmed by so many changes: genre, visual style, characters... Then, you must learn how to play a difficult-to-play game, with so many things to have into account. But in the end, it can be a compelling experience, with its ups and lows. Interesting, but it needs a lot of practice.

The Guilty Gear universe is accurately represented and the bizarro storyline may be tough to swallow, but it's no goofier than some of the anime that scores big on Adult Swim.

It is a good idea to combine action with strategy, but this time hasn't been achieved with prowess.

Guilty Gear 2 may be an interesting experiment in cross-genre game design, but it's mostly a shallow mess.

A dull, dreary game.

Problem is that neither the strategy nor combat elements are developed in any meaningful way. All but the most strategy-savvy gamers will regard the capture-and-hold mechanics as primitive, and as for the combat...well, I really wasn't kidding with the Dynasty Warriors comparison.

The combat system is too watered down to be compelling and the strategic aspect too simplistic. The only real challenge derived from the game lies in balancing these two aspects, which is satisfying for brief moments.