Reviewed: March 23, 2003
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
Ubisoft

Developer
From Software

Released: March 4, 2003
Genre: Action
Players: 1
ESRB: Teen

6
8
7
7
7.6

Supported Features:

One look at the box with the cool mech designs and there is no mistake that Murakumo is a Japanese import turned domestic release thanks to the folks at Ubisoft. The concept is quite simple. We jump ahead to the year 2090 where a big corporation is building giant robots called ARK’s (Artificial Reflexive Kineticoid). These giant robots work around a human operator with sensors that pick up the slightest movement of the pilot and replicate those moves.

The problem is that the company has rushed the ARK development and now errors have cropped up that are turning the robots against their human creators. Actually, there is a deeper element at work but I’ll leave that for you to discover. Enter the Murakumo, a special team of pilots assembled from the armed forces that are commissioned to track down and disable or destroy any rogue ARK’s.

From your massive dropship you can pick and choose from five ARK’s of your own, each with their own weapons, speed, and mobility rating. Much of your success will be picking the right ARK for the right missions. This is part intuition and part trial and error, as you won’t always know what’s in store for you until you attempt a mission.

Murakumo spans 20 pulse-pounding missions that take place above and below the city of Port Oliver. You’ll be streaking through the narrow canyon-like streets lined with towering skyscrapers, buzzing through a seaside amusement park, or pursuing rogue ARK’s along an island chain or into underground tunnels. The gameplay is fast and the action intense.

Even though you are flying robots that are loosely designed around the human form you will still find that this game plays much like a typical flight simulator, so much in fact that it even supports a flight stick controller. This was of particular interest to me, as I hadn’t had the opportunity to use my ThrustMaster Fox 2 Pro Flightstick since playing Airforce Delta Storm. I blew the dust of my relatively new joystick and settled in for quite an amazing experience.

Controlling your ARK is super-easy whether you have a stick or are simply using the gamepad. The analog stick moves your ARK while the Y toggles between chase and cockpit views. Both views work equally well with the game, but the cockpit cam offers a tremendous sensation of speed and a bit better targeting. The A and B buttons fire the primary and EX weapons that vary with each ARK. You may have a chain-gun, shotgun, or bazooka for a primary weapons with lock-on missiles, energy shields, or beam weapons for backup.

The left and right triggers control the forward and rear thrust boosters. You fly at a fixed speed that is already breaking the sound barrier, but when you kick in those boosters you are given a limited boost of speed that can shrink the distance to any target in mere seconds. Your booster power takes a few seconds to replenish after each use so creative boosting is essential, especially in some of the pursuit missions where you are chasing particularly fast ARK’s.

As the title might indicate, you spend most of the game in pursuit of rogue ARK’s, either to track them or destroy them. You are given a time/range limit in which you need to accomplish your mission or the enemy ARK will escape and you get to try it all over again. You can also lose a mission if you get too far behind the ARK you are chasing, and at supersonic speeds it only takes one wrong turn and a few seconds for this to happen.

Your main objective almost always consists of a single ARK but that won’t stop a dozen or more other smaller enemies to pop-up and get in your way. These are usually handled with some casual collateral fire, as you try to maintain a line of pursuit with your primary target.

The HUD, which varies based on your chosen camera view, does a good job of communicating all necessary information required for your mission. You have a lock-on targeting sight that auto-locks on the nearest target. This can prove troublesome when you are lining up that perfect shot on the main ARK and some smaller enemies flying into range and distract your weapons fire.

Even though there are 20 missions, many of them are rather short and even the longest ones only last a few minutes. They are also highly repetitive. Sure, you are chasing a new ARK over a new location in possibly a new ARK of your own but the city starts looking the same about halfway through the game. They do mix things up a bit by throwing in some missions that take you underground or over the ocean and they even have some challenging night missions. You will certainly have that feeling of déjà vu as you near the end of the game, but no more so than any other flight combat game.

Once you have finished the story missions you can go back and play the Expert and Trial Missions. These missions are structured much like the ones in the story mode only they are much more challenging and will put your reflexes to the ultimate test.

The between-mission cutscenes are also very nice with characters that definitely show their Japanimation roots. These appear after every few levels, but most of your briefings come in the form of radio communication in a pop-up window on your HUD. The HUD itself is a nice design that is color-coded to the ARK you are piloting and displays your status as well as the status of any target. You can customize this HUD, changing the color or toggling any of the individual displays to your liking.

The levels are quite nice although they do get a bit repetitive. Flying over endless stretches of cityscape starts to get boring even when they toss in the occasional skyscraper that pokes above the rest. They do mix things up a bit with some coastal areas with beaches, a football stadium, a seaside amusement park, and underground freeway tunnels, but it won’t take long before you start to recognize familiar models and repeating textures.

The ARK designs are all fairly creative and even though they have arms and legs they tend to look more like complicated airplanes than anything else. There is a cool engine glow effect from the rear of each ARK and weapons fire from the pods located on the arms. These aren't the conventional land-based mechs you might think they are by looking at the box cover.

Sound effects are minimal and range from the whining and hissing of your ARK’s engines to the swoosh of rockets and the rat-a-tat-tat of your chain-gun that often ends with deafening explosions. It’s all presented in a Dolby Digital surround mix that is truly exceptional.

The voice acting is admittedly some of the worst I’ve heard in a long time, but I almost expect that with any Japanese game that decides to make the trip across the ocean. The cast is downright comical in their reading of the script. There are a few acceptable lines of dialog that are read with moderate acting skill (I did enjoy the captain who sounds like a dead ringer for Donald Sutherland), but most of the script is read by what appears to be nervous high school students in their first-year speech or drama class. Syllables and even entire words are randomly emphasized for no apparent reason making all of the conversations disjointed and unnatural. I’m not sure who was responsible for the localization of this title, but it would have been much better to just keep the Japanese dialog and let us read English subtitles.

The 25 Expert missions present an even more formidable challenge, and while I haven’t finishing all of them I have spent many long hours chasing down ARK’s in this pursuit mode. I haven’t even begun to explore the Trial modes, which claim to be the hardest challenge of all. Gulp! There is even a Free Mission mode to tinker with. To fully explore this entire game you can expect a good 15-25 solid hours of gaming.

Some two-player split-screen action would have been appreciated, but Murakumo can still entertain a group of gamers by simply switching off. Missions are generally pretty short so nobody will have to wait long, and this is one of the few games that is as much fun to watch (and shout suggestions) as it is to play.