Danger Girl

Babes, bullets? and more babes! Comic creators J. Scott Campbell and Andy Hartnell team up with THQ and n-Space to bring you the PlayStation version of Danger Girl.

Babes, bullets? and more babes! Comic creators J. Scott Campbell and Andy Hartnell team up with THQ to bring you the PlayStation version of Danger Girl. The feisty foursome of femme-fatales come over with all the charm of the comic, but game design manages to get in their way.

Dangerous Curves
For those of you who don't know, Danger Girl is a popular comic series about a small group of female special agents charged with the destruction of a terrorist organization known as the Hammer. This Nazi-throwback group wants to bring the entire world under its iron grip and only a handful of hard-bodied heroines can stop them. Danger Girls Abbey Chase (treasure hunter), Sydney Savage (whip-wielding super-spy), and newcomer J.C. (master mechanic) must step lightly into peril to take down the evil organization. With help from Danger Girl-hopeful Valerie back at headquarters, they have just about everything they need to succeed.

In the PlayStation version, however, they're missing the most vital ingredient: game design. While the level layouts look fine and make sense, little things like stiff control and frustrating mission goals take away from the experience of playing an episode of the comic. While the overall Danger Girl feel is there, you'll too often feel as though you're just playing another Syphon Filter or Tomb Raider clone.

Girls, Guns, And Grainy Graphics
Danger Girl's graphics suffer from the same thing most recent PlayStation games have struggled with: comparison to newer systems. While it looks okay on its own, the game's slow framerate and grainy textures will leave you wishing for a Dreamcast or PS2 version. The game isn't the best-looking PlayStation title you'll see, but it's just good enough to put you firmly into the stylish Danger Girl universe.

Danger Girl controls a lot better than most other games of the type, leaving Tomb Raider's control scheme in the dust. Still, it's stiff and quirky, and it'll take some time before you're slingin' guns with the best of them. The absolute worst aspect of the gameplay is that there's no way to save during the missions; if you die, you have to restart the mission from the beginning. A mid-mission save feature, or even a system of checkpoints, would have helped immensely.

If you're a fan of the comic, you'll love the little extras, like J. Scott Campbell's original artwork, Andy Hartnell's work on the storyline and certain mission objectives, and (at long last) good voice acting to bring the voices of the 'Girls to life. Good music fills out the atmosphere well, even though the enemy voices and weapon noises don't add much to the sound quality.

Chasing Abbey
If you're a huge fan of the Danger Girl comic, you might want this game just for some new DG action, but fans of third person action titles probably won't find a lot new about Danger Girl for PlayStation. It's fun enough, but it's definitely not dangerous.

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