"Pretty Good Rent"

Dark Stalkers Chronicles: The Chaos Tower is a game in the Dark Stalkers series. It seems to have all of the fighting styles of each game compiled into one. While this game may be good for a few hours or a few days, at most, it's excellent for the time you do play it.

Game play (8/10): This game is your typical fighter game set in a 2-D arena. This game does well in game play, though. There are a good amount of characters to choose from, and if you prefer a harder game the fights can be quite challenging. There is one weakness, though: the special moves. For me, at least, they were sometimes hard to pull off. I was mostly sticking to the default combos, and the kicks and punches. But otherwise, this game's game play is probably one of its strong points.

There's your default arcade mode, and then there's a tower mode, where you go through a tower, fighting opponents one at a time, and if you met a special condition in the fight, such as finish with full health, you would usually take a shortcut to skip one or two fights. The special conditions are stated at the beginning of the battle. The challenging part, though, is going through many floors, (I haven't gotten past twenty) with only three characters, and you don't heal at all after any battles! So it's a good idea to avoid hits as much as possible in all battles. The reason, though, for going through tower mode, is to get unlockable content, such as character portraits. Overall it has good game play.

Story (5/10): Basically, you have to stop the evil Jedah (if you're not playing as him) from reviving an ultimate demon. That's basically it. All you do is go through arcade mode, defeating one enemy at a time, until you fight the big guy himself. Once you beat the game, that's basically it for arcade mode, unless you want to try with a different character.

Graphics and Sound (9/10): The graphics are just how Capcom usually makes them, in a 2-D cartoon style, but that's not a bad thing! In fact, in using cartoon sprites, the characters are more detailed, and look sharper and all around better. The sounds are excellent, too. The sounds are very sharp and easy to hear. You hear the sounds from beating up someone while never lagging behind, and some of the special moves have awesome sounds. The graphics and sounds are this game's strongest point.

Play time and replay (4/10): Here's where the game takes a hit. Once you finish arcade mode, that's it. There's no reason to continue with arcade mode unless you want to try out all the characters. Tower mode will last you a good time, I still don't know exactly how many floors there are, but I know there's a lot. There's also a reason to play tower mode to unlock stuff, but you'll probably get frustrated and give up after a day or two of constantly getting your butt kicked in tower mode.

Overall (7/10): This game is good for a little bit, but it won't keep you entertained for more than a week, two weeks at most. If you have the patience to try and unlock everything it the tower, you should buy this. If not, I suggest renting it. But in the week or two you do play it, it does serve its purpose pretty well.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/03/05