Review: 'Dead or Alive 5: Last Round'

Gilesa Thomas ’18 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer
If you are looking for a decent fighting game to spend hours playing—at least until Mortal Kombat X comes out—Dead or Alive 5 is the game for you. The moves and attacks are awesome and fast. It offers five levels of difficulty, which is particularly good for players looking for a gradual difficulty curve. Survival is a completely addictive mode that perfectly solves the game’s issues with repetition by sending characters that drop power-ups into the arena in random costumes. Other modes include the classics—Arcade, Free Training, Story, Time Attack, Tutorial, and Versus. There is also, of course, Multiplayer. Multiplayer for Dead or Alive 5 allows you to go online or play locally with split screen. Online Multiplayer offers ranked and unranked matches, which makes it perfect both for experts and newer players who may feel more intimidated. Arcade mode has a feature that allows the player to enter an online match midway through their current match. The player can decide after the match whether or not they want to return to Arcade mode, and that online match goes towards the Arcade score. Players should also check out Story mode.

The story is more entertaining than emotion-evoking, but it is well-written and captivating, and also alludes to the previous games. Playing the previous games is not vital to following the storyline; although some parts might not make sense without context, it’s fairly easy to fill in those blanks. Like most fighting games, Story mode can easily be beaten in six hours, but it is a fun six hours. The characters each have a mini storyline that the player learns and sees how they connect to other characters. The voice acting is about average for a fighting game; the accents may be bothersome if you’re a stickler for that, as players might find themselves cringing—or laughing—every time Zack speaks.
The graphics are smooth but a little bit laggy, though this may depend on your platform. The graphics themselves do not take away from the characters themselves, however. Gamers with the most recent consoles will notice an “enhancement” on the chests of the female characters compared to the same characters on the older consoles. This takes away from the game, as women everywhere will experience sympathetic chests pains as those characters move around in the game. Aside from that one feature, the characters and locations do in fact look more realistic.

With all that being said, there are some minor letdowns. Xbox One users might not want to buy the game, as many players found that the game crashes frequently and almost instantly when engaging in online gameplay. Other platforms have not been reporting the same issues. Team Ninja and Mad Catz are working together to fix the issue, so hopefully an update will come out soon.