Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 (Xbox 360)
With Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, Team Ninja put a group of women from the Dead or Alive fighting game series in bikinis and sent them to the beach with the excuse that all the opportunities to ogle the girls were a byproduct of the beach volleyball they were engaging in. For the sequel though, some of that pretense is dropped, and while Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 features volleyball still and more minigames than its predecessor, its more flagrant approach to providing eye candy also leads to a fairly shallow gameplay experience.
After the volleyball vacation of the first Xtreme game, the resort island plunged under the sea due to a volcanic eruption. The owner, Zack, sets out to restore it, pulling it back up to the surface and christening it New Zack Island and offering some of the girls he’d usually find himself fighting in the Dead or Alive games a two week getaway. Nine girls in total show up, the player picking one they’ll stick with for all 14 days, choosing which activities they’ll engage with and which of the other girls they’ll socialize with. The girls are fully voice acted and you can get the basics of their personality from their interactions like Christie being cold and domineering in most her interactions or Tina being outgoing and casual. You’re not really going to learn much about them and their interactions are often quick and to the point, but the nine girls are mostly distinct enough in personality and appearance, although you can only have one vacation going at a time and must finish it if you wish to change girls.
New Zack Island has many summer activities to engage in but also provides quite a few spots where girls can just lounge around or play in the island environment idly, although relaxing is usually an excuse to give you some specific angles on their swimsuit clad bodies. The game does devote the level of attention one would hope to contriving good angles and scenarios to facilitate the appreciation of the female form the game hopes you’ll be satisfied with in lieu of compelling gameplay. Many swimsuits are available for purchase with the stringier ones costing considerably higher amounts as a reward for earning cash in the minigames, but the somewhat overzealous jiggle physics can definitely feel over the top. Naturally it would be expected to be heightened to some degree with the game’s focus on beach babes bouncing around having fun, but sometimes small simple actions can see both breasts moving about asynchronously. It never gets too ludicrous, the girls have pretty reactive chests but it isn’t like they’ve strapped two water balloons to their front, but besides the secret pole dances that are incredibly hard to unlock through luck-based slot machine play, it is usually trying to titillate with provocatively dressed women engaging in activities more appropriate for spicy photo shoots than something that would really earn this game it’s M rating.
For your fortnight with the lady of your choice, each day will be split into four periods. During morning, midday, and the evening you’ll select places on the island to engage in activities with the nighttime devoted to wrapping things up with some sleep or dropping by the casino. During the day you can visit the various shops on the island as you please without progressing time, these allowing you to buy items like tickets to play certain minigames, new swimsuits, better jet skis for the water races, and knickknacks you can gift to other girls on the island. If you want your lady to hang out with another vacationer or play with her as your doubles partner in volleyball you’ll need to earn her favor by assailing her with gifts. There’s no way to know what a girl likes and it isn’t always intuitive what they’ll be into so earning a girl’s favor is a trial and error process with little time to engage with it since you can only gift a girl once at night or when you can find her around the island during the day. Spending your precious time gifting her something she may refuse makes the time you have for actual action elsewhere feel more restricted when it normally doesn’t feel so tight, but beyond the beach volleyball minigame you don’t actually require a partner and do your island trip on your lonesome once the partner you get at the start goes her own way. Still, unlocking special swimsuits does involve engaging with this social system and guesswork and a good deal of your cash seems intended for you to spend on gift giving rather than getting things for your own girl.
The minigames where you can earn money are a mixed bag but at least more rewarding then potentially being stymied by a girl who didn’t like that specific color of RC plane you bought her but would absolutely love it in blue. The beach volleyball tracks the ball too much with its camera angle, meaning players can be off-screen at times and lining up a return can be complicated by that unusual choice of perspective. It’s fairly simple to play even if sometimes it feels like your ally has no issue spiking the ball right into net and it thankfully uses the ruleset where either side can score rather than just the team serving. The girls all have different advantages and failings in volleyball so you can try to pick your partner for that reason, but it is one the minigames that comes out okay instead of feeling too lean or bland.
Jet ski races are perhaps the best actual gameplay on offer for two major reasons: its easy to earn cash in them and they pose more of a fair challenge than most other options. The Marine Race takes place across a few different locations with some appreciably different designs, some having more dry land you can accidentally beach yourself on, a sequence of ramps to get air off of, or tight spaces as you weave through a small rocky water lane. Admittedly, once you get a hang for how your vehicle controls in the water, it won’t even really matter if you’re still using the default jet ski as the other racers aren’t quite the most gifted opponents, but even once you’ve learned the tracks and understand the movement, it’s not a fully given win. Boosts can be earned by driving near colored buoys properly and the other girls can and will do so to earn boosts to make up for their lower skill level, and while you can find some shortcuts by ignoring the buoys, the boost can sometimes be as good an aid to make up for that need to focus a bit more on precise maneuvering. More interesting though is the trick system where while you’re driving you can drive in a flashy way to sacrifice some control for extra cash after the race, meaning identifying moments to show off becomes profitable. Doing tricks after hitting ramps also adds some of that decision making as the ramps can be positioned so you have to turn a little wider to hit them. Unfortunately it can’t be played in multiplayer and the computer controlled competition needs a bump in competency to make this mode more exciting, but it does feel like this minigame is Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 at its gameplay best even if it might not be the most conducive to providing eye candy like other ways to play.
To round out our money-making go-tos and decent ways to play we’ll look at the casino, where a small selection of games of chance are on offer. The slot machines are about as straight forward as spinning three wheels and hoping they line up in your favor can be, save for the odd complication where some outcomes can drain your funds beyond what you bet on the roll. You’ll quite often get some sort of match, but the inclusion of negative rolls instead of ones that just lack a payout make this gambling opportunity perhaps one best avoided unless you’re already flush with cash. Roulette is a bit more interesting since it is still up to random chance but you play at a table with three other girls and they seem to have at least a small sense for what the ball will land on. They’ll bet all over the board though so hedging your bets is a smart play, but also you can unfortunately get locked at roulette’s long spins if you don’t exit during the short breaks between rounds since there’s no exiting once the wheel gets moving. Poker oddly enough doesn’t let you see the actual girls you’re playing against beyond facial portraits, although the custom deck featuring pictures of the cast is at least an interesting touch. It is a simple five card draw form of poker where you make bets on the quality of the cards in your hand and whether you have any special matches until its time to reveal who won and takes the pot, it at least easy to fold or influence your potential payout compared to the randomness elsewhere. Blackjack has other girls present playing as well although they are mostly for show unless you want to start counting cards to figure out if you have a good chance of drawing what you need to near a card total of 21 without going over, and with different bet levels and the option to raise bets easily it’s not a bad way of building up cash since the casino portion lasts as long as you want compared to the one and done activities participated in during the day.
Unfortunately, the other minigames in Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 are all weaker than the previously mentioned selection of activities that are mostly just okay. The water slide is a purely solo challenge where you tackle the same wildly designed slide each time, needing to control your speed and bank at the turns properly to try and conquer it. It is a surprisingly fast slide with dangerous twists and turns and you’ll have to learn through failures how to tackle its tougher portions, but while it’s often not a productive use of time because you won’t be earning cash on a loss and don’t get too much even for a win, it’s at least a victory you can work towards with some practice despite its design practically demanding a few failures to even know what you’re up against. Pool hopping has you crossing the island’s large swimming pool by hopping across color coded floaties, the colors representing four buttons on your Xbox 360 controller. You sometimes need to hold a button a bit instead of just tapping it to clear a greater gap between platforms, but mostly this is just a test of button speed for a simple task and you don’t even technically need to hit the right buttons if you don’t care about the size of the payout.
The three minigames that are the absolute worst though are Beach Flags, Butt Battle, and Tug-of-War. Beach Flags has both girls dash to a flag trying to grab it first, the player mashing A to run before hitting B to dive for the flag. The A mashing is a curious beast as it seems to just sometimes make the opponent better or worse than you no matter how hard you’re mashing, so it’s not really worth attempting even before you consider its basic design. Butt Battle is an outright guessing game though as you and a girl stand on the same floatie on the water back to back and try to knock each other off. There is no way to gauge what an opponent is going to do until it’s being done, and while you can sometime recover from a bump from your opponent’s rear end, it’s often more likely one girl will be hit hard enough to go off too quickly to react or one person will dodge and cause the other to slip up from doing so. Naturally the appeal is likely meant to be that they’re smacking each other with their butts but it can be over so quickly and the outcome is just hoping you picked the right maneuver most of the time that there’s not even much time to appreciate the girls and their odd form of competition. Tug-of-War is definitely the weakest as it is pure guessing as you cannot know what the opponent will do and there’s even less of a chance to recover. You and the opponent are on individual floating platforms now holding a rope and trying to yank the other person in the water, but you only have the option to pull and fake a pull. Faking a pull means an attempt by the other person to pull will cause them to fall backwards, and unless you pull at the same time a pull where there is no feint will probably pull the other girl into the water with ease. There’s no way to know what your opponent will do so you just try and hope, Tug-of-War just a shallow game with a weak payout that you might not even get if you don’t happen to win the guessing game.
The good news is that outside of the tutorial you only need to play the games you want to so you can write off all the worse ones, but the remaining few aren’t really deep enough to hold your interest. The curvaceous women are likely to pull some of their weight there to make it feel less repetitive, but even though the 14 day vacation will probably take about an hour or two unless you get deep into the casino play, it still feels like you’ve exhausted the interactive content quickly and are just left without much motivation to play beyond maybe seeing a different girl pose around the picturesque island. There is a customizable soundtrack that plays behind the activities, reggae music and island tunes like Sweet Sensual Love from Big Mountain and Reggae Dancer by Inner Circle feeling right at home while Hilary Duff’s Sweet Sixteen is an odd inclusion conceptually. The licensed tracks do include things like a good cover of Lovin’ You that fits the relaxed tone and most songs can work both when you’re focused on them or they fade into the background as an unobtrusive underscore to the day’s activities, and with some customization options you can also adjust the rotation some if any do get too repetitive at least.
THE VERDICT: Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 is a minigame collection with some bikini-clad eye candy to ease the fact that few of the minigames are actually worth playing. Some like Tug-of-War are boring guess games that aren’t fruitful and some like the tough water slide ride eat up valuable time on your short vacation just figuring them out, but spending a bit of time jet skiing, gambling at the casino, or engaging in some volleyball isn’t too bad despite how basic and easy such activities can feel. Some love was definitely put into making the girls appealing even if they’re more there to pose and put on swimsuits you buy rather than having pronounced personalities, but letting you guide a day’s activities means that at least you can indulge in whatever tasks satisfy your need to earn money for the socializing element or your need to see some lovely ladies on a relaxing island getaway.
And so, I give Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 for Xbox 360…
A BAD rating. Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 is unfortunately a game where it’s often wiser to avoid its content and what you do end up doing isn’t too captivating unless you’re really into the specific ladies posing on the screen. Minigames like Tug-of-War have little room to excite in any sense of the word and the game is perhaps too careful not to get too difficult in play options like the Marine Races where the entire experience could have been carried by that game alone. Picking times to do your tricks while navigating a course is a fine foundation for a jet ski game in general and the beach volleyball is at least in a mostly standard mold despite its camera problems, but committing to those games for your daily activities will wear them down and make the short vacation feel even more empty. Trying to win the fickle favor of other girls on vacation has too much guesswork and they’re surprisingly hard to please, but with the rewards being special swimsuit gifts and a volleyball partner it again ends up something that is probably not worth the time investment. A lot of your island activities will probably be just trying to squeeze out something a bit novel unless you decide to engage with the money-making game to get the high end goodies, but that also makes repetitive play the preeminent way to make a consistent profit. While the game would need to make sure some of its minigames are given as much attention as the character models to be a more enjoyable experience, some ideas like including an endless vacation mode could give room for figuring out the social system a bit more. It could also be nice to have these girls you’re watching pose on the beach share a bit more about themselves. Visual novel dating sims with even more lurid end goals will do more work to help you get to know a girl better than Dead or Alive Xtreme 2, but with mostly shallow play it does feel like its expecting you just to be here for the admittedly well rendered if overly animated physiques on show.
Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 can be sexy when it wants to be and that’s often when you’re not even doing much but watching girls lounge around. When you pop into a minigame you’ll often be occupied with something that isn’t that great and doesn’t even offer nice camera angles to compensate for those issues. You can make a mostly inoffensive course through the minigames if you have the dedication needed to get the really expensive swimsuits and special interactions, but it is more work than its worth to reveal a bit more virtual flesh. It’s not the worst way to get your fix though and these are specific girls from a franchise you might have gotten to know elsewhere, but their island vacation still feels like it could try to provide more interesting activities rather than leaning on their sex appeal.