Samurai Showdown 2 is the sequel to 1 of the best Neo Geo games at its time. The second instalment was profoundly better in everyway. The visuals gained a major face lift. From the character sprites having more detail and definitely a deeper colour scheme to the lush backgrounds and awesome locations. Along with the visual aspect the sound portion of the game had received a pretty good upgrade as well. Very good upbeat music, combat sounds for slashes and stabs that will make you cringe almost making you understand the kind of damage you receiving and dishing out.
Now onto more important aspects of the game. The characters roster has been fiddled around with due to the addition a few characters such as Sieger, arm cannon wielding pirate, and Cham Cham, an acrobatic jungle cat girl. The game-play hasn’t changed much but that just fine with mostly anyone who has played the game. Solid controls for basics, special, and desperation attack commands though the desperation attack commands still have a slight difficult nature to pulling them off. This doesn’t take away from the game-play though because the game would not be too fun if your opponent could just repeatedly perform their desperation attack over and over again with ease. I think it would get pretty frustrating.
Another interesting thing
about the game-play is that it still retains it classic style of fighting. What I mean is that the game is a more strategy based game. You won’t find large combos like you would find in games like Marvel vs. Capcom 2 or the Street Fighter 3 series. Now the difficulty of the game in my experience can be pretty easy on the lowest settings but it can become very difficult even at half the maximum difficulty at times. So beginners can pick this game up and be satisfied as well as the hardcore fighting game fans out there looking for a challenge. The only flaw I think this game has is the choice of special moves given to the characters. Most of them are very bland and look awkward, unreliable, and very unappealing. No worries though this was fixed in later instalments of the series.
All in all a great fighting game to pull out every once and a while when your friends are over and have fun. My rating for this game is a 9/10.
