Once you have all these characters to play with you’ll undoubtedly want to change how they look. Thankfully the developers have included a huge unlockable system where you can get new costumes and hairstyles. And of course you want new places and modes to play with these in so they threw in a significant amount of unlockable characters, levels, and modes that will keep you busy for a surprisingly long time. In the story mode there are end movies for each character as well and all are extremely entertaining and well worth the time it takes to unlock them. And if that’s not enough it also has, like all 360 games, a large list of achievements which total 45 and range from winning 100 matches unbeaten online to playing the game for five hours.

That five hours will be easy as pie with all that was mentioned above but then they went ahead and added a top notch online system which will surely shoot fans into the 50 if not the 500 hour mark. While everything that can be done offline is fun it’s still basically the same old unlockable system that fighters have been using for years so the online is pretty much the freshest and most enjoyable part of this latest version of DOA. The modes while online are standard and include Quick Match, Optimatch, and Custom Match, but the options that can be set within these matches really make them unique.

The biggest unique feature to the online component of DOA 4 is definitely the psychedelic crack land known as the lobby. In the lobbies you get to hang out with cartoon characters and you can even pick your own cartoon friend as your own avatar. Every time you fight you get good old Zack dollars which can be used to purchase crap for your lobby and costumes for your fighters. The lobby is so strange and so far removed from what DOA is visually that you really feel like the developers went a bit mad at some point and threw this in for a laugh and a half. When you’re actually fighting online you’ll feel like it’s offline as there is no lag and the visuals and responsiveness of the controls are just as good. Searching for and joining a game are just as well handled as both are painless and quite fast to hookup. It’s truly and online fighting dream.

Love it or hate it, DOA is headed in the direction of becoming a deep fighter. With the changes to the fighting system, the monstrous amount of unlockables, and the near perfect online play this isn’t just another version of DOA like DOA 3 was, this is a whole new game.

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• Online
  
• Mechanic changes
  
• Great new visuals
  
• Huge amount of unlockables

• Mechanic changes aren't for everyone