Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: Reign of Fire

Written by Chris Reiter on October 22, 2002

Full Review: What are Reign of Fire's ingredients? Roasted, toasted, char broiled human, with a pinch of dragon saliva.

Hollywood and I seem to agree on the same issue -- Reign of Fire was at best a pretty mediocre movie. Pretty because it had great visuals effects -- mediocre because the story lacked a lot of stuff. Then again, Reign of Fire for the PlayStation 2 is in another format farther than any constrained movie limitations. BAM! Entertainment Reign of Fire's publishing team, and Kuju Entertainment, its developers, must've took a serious long look at the movie, and wanted to do away with what made it as bad, by adding onto the boatload for an overall satisfaction guaranteed ride into the dragon's mouth to have players blown away.

Based on the movie's plotline, Reign of Fire centers on London's grisly future in the year 2024 after a race of dragons are awoken only to reap terror across the world in an effort to wipe human beings off the face of the planet almost entirely. There is but one man left standing alive that is brave enough to want to rid humans of this pest problem: an American dragon slayer and leader of the Kentucky Irregulars, Van Zan. Another man just wants to protect what humans there are left from total annihilation: his name Quinn. Together, these two will form an alliance in order to defeat the very origin from which dragons multiply. To do that though, they're calling on you -- a nameless, faceless individual who knows how to drive fast, shoot hard, and live long enough to see the face of tomorrow.

More than just the exact storyline, Reign of Fire also covers areas in which the movie hadn't gone to, that in a way makes the game better in terms of how far you can go with the idea of dragon slaying. Beyond being human, this idea especially works well with the ability to actually take flight as a dragon. Yes, you. Once you've been through the entire main game of riding around in tiny military type vehicles, you can then switch over and become one of the many flying and ferocious beasts of obliteration. Handing players flying missions to pick up trucks and drop them on top of unsuspecting persons, or even to gouge your foes with bursts of flames, it can be done.

Where the game starts however is a questionable trip asking if you'd actually want to continue on. Not being able to start out immediately from the dragon's point of view is a disappointment, since the human levels are tougher than they look. The game kicks off with the basic guidelines of teaching one how to drive in one of the game's vehicles -- which in turn will be the basis for all vehicles. Beginning in the jeep with a turret attached on its back, players can graduate to the fire truck (lets you spray water to put out flames), the buggy (small, but fast), and even a whole lot of tank (armor plated and powerful). And each time you begin a new mission (9 in total), you'll have a different objective; some having you guard an entire fleets of vehicles from ruin, another having you bombard a dragon's nesting ground to collect eggs for research, while another involves driving back and forth to a distant crop to extinguish and rescue Quinn's men.

Reign of Fire's missions can be a bit vague and at times even confusing (in one mission for example, you must lead a convoy up mountain trails while attacking dragons left and right, only the game doesn't tell you the way exactly). Plus, the game's more complicated than fighting one of few dragon types. From both land based dragons (one that looks similar to a raptor from Jurassic Park and another that's gigantic and likes to crawl around on its stomach) to the others that take flight (one of them being small and quick as lightning and another being huge but more powerful), there's plenty going on in the game screen the whole way through. To get there however, you've got to deal with control mechanics that aren't exactly perfect examples of how to evade or eradicate the flying prey at your gun's other end. Primary machinegun fire comes with the press of the R1 switch, missile fire with the L1 and L2 switches, backing up uses the square button, and to accelerate your driving life you'll need to press the X button in combination with the left analog stick. While the game controls are pretty easy to figure out within a short limit, there's a major camera control issue still intact. The analog stick actually dictates where your vehicle's targeting measurement is heading, but this also works for which direction the vehicle is in gear towards. Throughout all points in playing the game, you'll feel a little lost in the midst of trying to direct both the gun and the truck's push and pulls in every which path that there is to embark upon.

Another disappointing gripe I have with the gameplay is that there isn't enough weapon or health supplies to help the player struggle past the fiery airborne or land ridden fiends. In fact, Reign of Fire barely scrapes the surface by allowing players only but one to two packs of missiles or health per mission. Attacking your adversaries is easy enough to figure out how to do by aiming and firing with what you have to use. Where the supply of machinegun bullets is at an all time infinite high, the regular missiles and homing missiles arrive in limited quantity. Even though it's easier to contribute homing missiles to the offensive plan, it's kind of a dead issue to think about using regular missiles when they can't lock on to the super fast smaller dragons of the sky, and shouldn't have to even be wasted on the much weaker Jackal breed (the raptor look-alikes). Ranging from impossible to near impossible, it's really hard to fire at a soaring lizard when you can never tell where their next move may be, while at the same time trying to avoid getting spat on with a dose of fiery brew.

The health issue too is a problem, because of the fact that there's no other way to regain any life without a health pack. As dragons litter raining balls of magma breath along the roadways, you'll find that your vehicle will light up and become just another tasty morsel for the larger living things of this game's world. The longer your vehicle stays roaring like a fireplace, the faster your health disappears. And the only way to douse out your own flaming pile of heap most of the time will be either to entrench it in shallow water or find some source of pipe to blast away at and then receive its leaky spray. Sometimes your friends will supply your vehicle with a healthy dose of refreshing water sprinkles, but this won't happen during every mission -- and this is an area you'll have to work out on your own for the most of it.

Capturing the effect of a future gone horribly wrong, Reign of Fire boasts in its inanimate environments. Literally. Few and far between are areas that package a set of actual building models and the like. Then again, that doesn't really matter when you'll be more focused on the rest of what the game has to offer -- that is miles and miles of nothingness. Dusty dirt trails lead you across bumpy and rock rooted roadways, with but a little bit of realism added in from ash burned vehicle wreckage strewn along the edges of your travels and at times pipes lining the way to your destination. Even being the drab game that it is, Reign of Fire isn't without a doubt still somewhat of great appeal in its offbeat unforeseen world. Texturing on top of anything you can touch -- from ground, to vehicles, to the dragons themselves -- gives the game a lively pace in a lethargic setting.

When rolling across grazes of bumpy brown, the ground will splatter under your vehicle's toes. Your vehicle with it, while shrunken down to the scale of what a dragon might see as a small bug to crush, still has the proper animation attributes, like the fully rotating strip of tank bottom adhering to the power house's every movement, or how the dragons grace the air any and all which ways they choose to do so on their own. And by gazing up in the way one of the enormous scaly figures dies, it ruptures down towards its doom on your angle to run over it with the sense of victory at the back of your mind. Because there's also a lot of fire amassing across the screen, you'd probably expect a lot of shadow and lighting effects to go along with it. There are some, and then there aren't. For example, the shadow underneath your moving target stays hidden. And if it goes aflame, there's nothing there but a roasting scrap billowing up smoke as it drifts towards its own destruction. On the other hand, as dragons pass over you, you'll catch sight of a darkened silhouette in the ground's layers, but that's really all there is.

Not every movie-licensed game is fortunate enough to have the people who played the characters reprise their roles a second time. That being mostly the case for Reign of Fire, it's an unfortunate issue. The only actor here who does appear in the game is none other than Christian Bale who speaks for Quinn. However, it's not much of anything to praise since his part has been minimized to a lesser extent of scenes where he'll lend his narrative talent to the few clips of added movie footage through the game's progressive states, and send mission objectives out to you, then by allowing the fake Van Zan to do all the barking. Just like the movie, the voice talent is as dry as you'll find it anywhere else.

Besides the point of poorly versed speaking roles, there's a lot of other and better stuff to be heard. Strutting your stuff out into the fiery battlefield, you'll find rapid machinegun fire, explosive missiles setting off on impact, dragons screeching, fire crackling down from the heavens, wheels crumbling across the dirt plains, vehicles pounding into walls, and the rumbling of the ground as fire is cast around you and swarms of enemies overhead swarm into position for their destructive amusement. The music itself like the voice acting is another aspect that is a standard course of mediocre serving. It's looped through your ear drums in a coordination of some heavy and lighter pulses that aren't memorable in the least, although aren't bad at all to have to hear. Effectively they work -- if only enough that they're there for the sake of being there.