The original Rengoku was, let’s face it, a heaping pile of dung. This is reason number one why I wasn’t looking forward to reviewing Rengoku 2 the Stairway to Heaven. Actually that was reason one through ten on my ten reason list for not wanting to review it. But it just had to come out early in Japan and we just had to import it. It’s a disease really, but you reap the benefits and you’ll be happy to know this might be worth picking up if an uneducated friend gives it to you.

In Rengoku 2 you’re back in control of ADAM the android but this time around you’ll notice a nice surprise. His d-pad movement is actually 3D and not the horrible stiff eight direction rotation featured in the first game. That being said, his attacks still aren’t that great. Once again you can customize and upgrade several appendages of his body with different kinds of weaponry but unfortunately this screws up combos. If you’ve got a gun mounted on your head then you can’t string together a four pronged combo because guns don’t jive with melee combo attacks. Combos aside, there is a lot to like about the upgradeability of ADAM, it’s just actually using his appendage abilities isn’t all that fun after awhile.

And therein lies the major problem the first and now the second game faces and that’s boring repetition. Yes you can do a small variety of combos, yes you can upgrade your body, yes you can get all kinds of fancy add-ons and guns but it still boils down to mashing buttons and dodging attacks. Think of this game as Dynasty Warriors without the crowds and big combos but with an offbeat sci-fi atmosphere. It also doesn’t help that the entire game is split up into floors which have rooms which have a few enemies in them. It’s just a subset of a subset of the same thing over and over again.

While this all doesn’t work so well in a single player game, it really feels like it would be a great multiplayer brawler which is why I was actually interested when I noticed that Rengoku 2 came with a new WiFi mode. Unfortunately it’s ad-hoc which means local which means no internet which means I didn’t get to try it at all. The worst part of it all is that there’s a tease at the end of the manual about online compatibility but all it talks about is visiting the game’s website via the PSP’s web browser. Now why are they bringing this one over to the US again, anyone?