OUR RATING: 3.3 BAD About our ratings

TANGIBLES: Gameplay: 4 Visuals: 4 Audio: 4 Value: 3 Quality: 2

Why you should buy it: A sealed copy might be a collectable. Why you should rent it: There are better games than this on the Xbox.

UNIQUE RATING: 3.3 SUGGESTION: Skip It

The beat-em-up genre just isn't what it used to be. Back in the 80's and 90's, games like Double Dragon and Final Fight raked in huge piles of quarters. Almost every company wanted to have a hit beat-em-up game, and while many tried, some naturally had more success than others. As games moved from 2D to 3D, the genre seemed to fizzle. Very few games attempted to bring the style of gameplay back. So, can SpikeOut breathe new life into the seemingly dead genre'

The war between the teams of Diesel Town isn't over. Team Spike may have taken out the leader of Team Inferno, but that was ten years ago. Now, Inferno flares up again, and they're aiming to take out Team Spike and take control of Diesel Town once and for all. That's about all you need to know as far as the game's story goes. It's also somewhat interesting that Sega calls them 'teams' when they're really just gangs. Why are they trying to sugar coat it' It's a gang war, and they're not fooling anyone.

The game uses a very straightforward formula. You start at the beginning of a stage, fight your way through waves of similar looking bad guys, and then fight a boss. Rinse, and then repeat for eight levels. Those eight levels will take you roughly two hours to get through. It's short, but that's not necessarily a bad thing for a beat-em-up. Completing the game will unlock different characters. The more times you go through the game, the more characters you will unlock. If these characters had more variety to their moves, this might have added some value to the game. Unfortunately, the majority of the characters play very similarly. There might be a little bit of a difference in speed and power here and there, but the overall gameplay styles will be very consistent nonetheless.

Each character in SpikeOut has an array of moves in their arsenal. There are the regular attacks that you can string together to form a combo. There's also the charge move. Tapping the charge button lightly gives you a weak attack, holding it down a little longer will yield a stronger attack, and if the attack is charged up to its fullest, the character will dish out a devastating and usually room clearing strike. The trouble with this is that it takes way too long to charge up the move and it leaves you completely open while you're doing so. There's also a variety of miscellaneous attacks thrown in, like the sweep or jumping attack. Finally, every character has a limited stock of special attacks. These usually involve the character spinning around in circles hitting anything in the vicinity, a la Final Fight. For a bit of variety, Special attacks can be done while holding an enemy, effectively using them as a human baseball bat.

Despite the potential for variety here, the game quickly dilutes itself to a simple two move strategy. Simply mash the X button and use the A button to sidestep your enemies' attacks. Everything else quickly becomes filler and doesn't prove to be all that useful. This is mostly because the enemy AI doesn't put up much of a fight. Normal enemies do very effective punching bag impressions, and not much else. Bosses are slightly more challenging since they can power up and make themselves invulnerable for a moment or two. They'll then throw an attack or grab you and slam you, but once you learn to use the sidestep, this doesn't pose much of a problem.