Combat Queen
A long time favorite of mine on PS2, Combat Queen is a delightful mess of FMV game for the new millennium. I enjoyed it so much when I first got it over a decade ago that I even opened a short-lived user name on GameFAQs just so I could write a review of it, although I'm pretty sure it's one page that's never been viewed. Anyway, yeah, the game.
Combat Queen is a genre-blending FMV game that puts the player in control of the Combat Queen androids and their sweet pink jeep. There are two main types of play in the game that I've experienced, which are cursor shooting over FMV backdrops and early Resident Evil style horror/adventure stages. Your Combat Queens have an energy bar that has health on one side and gun battery on the other, and energy must be transferred between the two sides to work your way through the levels. The difficulty of these segments is surprisingly appropriate, and managing your energy flow is the key to success. The insectoid creatures you shoot at are superimposed CG over real-life footage of a cityscape. While this sort of concept on the Sega CD or 3DO might've felt... I don't know if passable would be an appropriate word... maybe at least in-step with the technology available, in high resolution with DVD clarity, it's perhaps even funnier in motion. There are boss stages that use what looks like rubber suit monsters that are played much the same way, and it has a very kaiju/super sentai feel to the way everything moves and the footage is shot.
The other adventure levels feature the same old, same old Resident Evil tropes, but are simply levels to complete instead of an over-arching story segment. You have fixed camera angles with what appear to be pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D models of the characters that look decent in the way that a good D3 Simple Series game can look good. I found them to be a little slow and dragging after playing the cursor shooting segments, but they aren't unbearable.
I'm not sure who Taito was making this game for, but I can only imagine it was me, as I just like to play oddball stuff when I get the chance. The game does offer a few extras, which are mostly behind-the-scenes footage or just bonus footage of the actresses doing mundane things such as bowling very poorly. Still, even in Japanese the game is very playable, and it allows saving between levels, so it's not such a chore to play through. It's probably an incredibly niche audience that would be interested in Combat Queen, requiring interest in both import games and FMV games, but if that's you, it's probably exactly what you want it to be. It was for me.
Reply With Quote