Developed/Published By: Arc System Works
Date of Release: December 14, 2016
Price: $49.99
"HEAVEN OR HELL, LET'S ROCK!"
Since the beginning of the series back on the original Playstation, the announcer in Guilty Gear has been calling out that same line at the beginning of every fight, and it never gets old. The rich heavy metal stylings of Guilty Gear have evolved constantly since the series inception, from the hard hitting sequel Guilty Gear X on the Dreamcast, the much celebrated Guilty Gear XX: The Midnight Carnival on the Playstation 2 (I'd like to pretend that Guilty Gear Isuka never happened), all the way up to Guilty Gear XX Accent Core on modern systems. And now everything has culminated in the release of the latest chapter, Guilty Gear Xrd -Revelator-.
If you've played any game in the Guilty Gear series you know what you're in for with -Revelator-, from the massive combos that the series is know for to the signature all or nothing instant-kill moves that can end a match instantly if you pull them off, but if you miss, you're toast. The controls are tight, the animations smooth, and the Unreal engine provides a perfect canvas for the series creator Daisuke Ishiwatari to strut his stuff. Instead of hand-drawn animated sprites that the earlier games used, the characters are all 3d models now, and are animated in such a way that they still appear to be hand animated, which is important as timing most moves and combos require you to watch for certain frames in the animation cycle. It's the perfect blend of modern technology and oldschool aesthetic.
So you have the usual Guilty Gear awesomeness in this package, plus a massive sit-back-and-watch cinematic story mode that will take hours to go through, nearly flawless lag-free online fighting, the requisite Master of Medals mode, and then on top of all that, it's got minigames out the wazoo. You also get a figure mode that lets you collect posable action figures of the main cast, and a bigass gallery of art, music and videos. Everything in the gallery has to be unlocked wither through fight money (world dollars) or fishing them up in the minigame mode. The entire game soundtrack is in there, plus alternate songs from other games in the series. All in all, it's pretty robust.
When it comes down to it, Guilty Gear Xrd -Revelator- is a shining example of how to bring a fighting game to the PC. There's plenty of graphical options, and the engine is superbly optimized (I can get over 200fps on my GTX 970, and my Alienware Steam machine r1 plays the game at 90+ maxed out). The only thing that let me down is the superb english dub that was present in the previous game, Xrd -Sign-, is missing here due to time constraints. Even so, -Revelator- is pretty much the perfect package, and there's enough content here to keep fighting fans entertained for a long time. I completely and wholeheartedly recommend it.
