GameSpot editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Poor
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 09/15/2000
- Released on: 09/06/2000
- Originally published on GameSpot: Danger Girl Review
Comic book properties generally have a pretty tough time making the transition into any other media, especially into video games. For every Marvel vs. Capcom, there are three Spawns. For every Captain America & The Avengers, there are three new dismal digital takes on Batman. Sadly, THQ's Danger Girl falls more into the latter category than the former. While not nearly as bad as, say, Titus' Superman for the N64, Danger Girl is not nearly as good as Activision's Spider-Man on the PlayStation, which still leaves quite a big area in which things can go wrong.
For those not familiar with the Cliffhanger comic series, Danger Girl revolves around a group of female covert operatives who try to foil the plans of Major Maxim and his fascist Hammer Empire. In the game, you take on the role of three of the agents: the team leader, Abbey Chase; the Australian whip lass, Sydney Savage; and the inventing whiz, JC. From there, the game bears heavy similarities to previous titles that the developer has created using the same game engine: Duke Nukem: Time to Kill, Die Hard Trilogy 2, and the forthcoming Duke Nukem: Planet of the Babes. As in all of these titles, you roam around a 3D world via a third-person perspective, shooting bad guys and performing the occasional bit of puzzle solving. Though n-Space's Duke games have had more of a platform-jumping bent to them, Danger Girl is more similar to the shooter section of Die Hard Trilogy 2 with its timed puzzles and item collecting.
However, several factors join to keep Danger Girl from being as enjoyable as even Die Hard Trilogy 2, a game generally not held in very high regard. While the characters in Danger Girl move and turn as slowly as in Die Hard Trilogy 2, it's much more of a problem in this game, because it favors large environments over the series of small rooms found in Die Hard Trilogy 2. Because of this, you might wander into a new area and have half your health bar shot away before you can turn to locate from which direction the shots are being fired. The slow-turning radius makes the game unnecessarily hard, and its long levels all but ensure that you'll get killed and have to complete the same basic tasks several times before you make it through. The developers seem to have tried to make up for the problematic turning radius by including a radar display, but its readout is so vague that it's generally useless. One possible way around this obstacle is to peek out from around every corner and try to shoot enemies from a distance before they spot you, but this strategy quickly becomes tiresome. That's a good way of summing up the problems of Danger Girl's gameplay: Those who don't find it frustrating will find it dull.
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