
Fundamentally, fighting is still rooted in the same weak and strong strikes and grapples of last year's game, but the way each attack works depends entirely on your fighter's style. Likewise, as no two fighters fight exactly alike, the controls from fighter to fighter vary a bit. The varying combinations of each style of fighting make trying to predict how each fighter will attack fairly difficult for at least your first couple of fights, thus forcing you to observe each fighter and how he or she works. All these styles are translated through what is, in essence, the same basic gameplay engine Vendetta used, but with a much, much higher emphasis on learning the styles and moves of your opponents. Essentially, each of the fighters in Fight for NY draws his or her individual move set from one to three of the game's five fighting styles, including kickboxing, street fighting, martial arts, wrestling, and submissions. While last year's Vendetta may have been solely a wrestling game in the eyes of most, Fight for NY takes the Aki engine and tweaks it quite a bit, speeding up the pace of the action and putting more focus on unique fighting styles than the standard strikes and grapples of old. Now Playing: Def Jam: Fight for NY Video Review Many of the top names in hip-hop have returned yet again to beat one another to a bloody pulp in Def Jam: Fight for NY.īy clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's No doubt, this is a more brutal, bloody, and foul-mouthed effort than last year's game, but this emphasis on mature content is backed up by great gameplay and an incredible atmosphere, effectively trumping Vendetta in every way that matters and making for a game that should appeal to hip-hop fans and fighting-game players alike. More hip-hop stars, more fighting styles, a much deeper story mode, and a big, fat M rating are the name of game in Fight for NY. Unsurprisingly, EA Games has followed up the success of Vendetta with a sequel, Def Jam: Fight for NY. But, somehow, the game not only worked, it worked extremely well, managing to create one of the most unique grapplers of this console generation. EA's seemingly unholy marriage of Aki Corporation's highly regarded wrestling-game engine with a hip-hop-themed street-fighting game featuring some of the rap business' top talent seemed like, at best, an oddball combination. When Def Jam Vendetta hit store shelves last year, it could not have been called anything but an out-of-left-field success.
