After watching game intros for years now, I've never felt so much urge and drive to play a game after watching one, as I have with Death By Degrees. It starts off perfectly, with Nina battling in a big cruise-ship, anything goes fighting match. With fantastic visuals and clever narration telling a story to you, the viewer, it becomes clear that Nina is merely the distraction; she is the 'sweeper' and there are two 'sneakers' on board, here for a specific mission. I won't spoil that for you though, just in case you decide to buy the game - 'in case' being the operative words!

Forgive me for being blunt for a second, but Death by Degrees simply isn't very good. Nina Williams is a fantastic character in Tekken and I can see why they've used her in this type of game - firstly for the Tekken fans to spend their cash and secondly because Nina is a natural born fighter with the looks of a goddess. So we're targeting fans and people that like to see a plenty of flesh. Sadly, Death By Degrees is a basic fighting game with basic features and a whole host of problems that are really going to bug you in the long run. But we're jumping the gun here - let me talk about controls.

Controlling the game is almost certainly the biggest problem here. Anybody that's played a decent fighting game before couldn't feel further away from home if they tried. The mechanics use the two analogue sticks to their full potential - by smacking the right analogue stick in a certain direction, Nina punches, kicks, shoots, or does whatever the situation requires - like when you've grabbed somebody, a swift push of the right stick and your enemy is going over your shoulder, catching an eye full of cleavage and going smack bang on the floor, in the direction you pressed. Then the left analogue stick is used to walk (really slowly, I might add), or if you push it hard enough in the direction you want, Nina will back flip or cartwheel to 'evade' in the selected direction.

That doesn't sound too bad on paper, but you try rubbing your belly and patting your head at the same time. You either end up patting both areas or rubbing both areas. [Hang on - can do both! Ha! Chuff-Ed]. It's almost the same scenario here. When I'm kicking the hell out of a group of surrounding thugs with the analogue stick, I find it hard to tell my fingers to press the other stick while in the middle of kicking people. Maybe it's just me, but I find the whole system to be awkward and with evades being difficult to pull off with the amount of humph needed on the left stick, if you do get a chance, Nina usually ends up walking instead of dodging. One neat little trick that you can perform is to run up a wall and back flip down again if you dodge towards the wall. This is sometimes useful, but as I say, a little awkward to pull off.

It's a shame you cannot kick and punch with the buttons instead. Believe me, I always press the buttons by mistake and when you press that dreaded square button, it loads your inventory. Resident Evil sees the inventory pop up before you could say Chris Martin, but the Death By Degrees inventory takes a whopping five seconds to fully load and function. If time is money, I dread to think how much money I've lost by pressing square by accident and having to wait for it to load and then come out of the menu. The inventory isn't the only thing that sports loading times though, oh no. The best way all of this can be described is by saying that it's like the original Resident Evil, with the funny camera angles and door opening sequences but tons more loading times.

And we thought that we'd seen an end to old school Resident Evil controls, camera angles and pre-rendered graphics, but Death By Degrees treats us to a blast from beyond the past. When you go up some stairs, and there's going to be a few enemies, or a cut scene, the screen fuzzes out and takes its time to load. Anything that would normally require a load takes longer than it should in the impatient twenty-first century. Going through doors seems more like a chore than anything else and, after a while, you just become fed up. The graphics have a pre-rendered feel to them, even though I don't think the game has ever seen a pre-render in its life. Sometimes they are actually quite detailed; Nina looks stunning and some of the special effects look quite nice. The menu systems are neat and tidy, so were it not for long loading times and often bad camera angles, the graphics might just earn my respect. As it is, Jak 3 looks a lot nicer and features no loading times, so there's really no excuse for the endless loading.

Thankfully there are a couple of redeeming features in Death By Degrees that up the score enough to deem it as a bargain bin beat em' up buy. Nina has a little thing called focus. By building this up, holding down a button and tapping the left stick towards an enemy, you see the skeleton of the enemy you've just selected. You then have a small number of seconds to put a cursor over the red-lit part of the skeleton and tap punch. If executed correctly, Nina performs some bone breaking move to that part of the body which, normally brings your opponent down with just the one hit. Effects for this are pretty cool, and breaking somebody's skull over and over doesn't seem to get boring either.

Picking up guns is quite fun - it's always nice to have a combination of guns and fists, although the gun system is like a bad Resident Evil one; L1 to ready your gun and then use the analogue stick to fire! Why anyone would persist with thismethod is beyond me. To counter these small good elements, I have one last bad thing; saving a game has never been as hard. Nina has a little radar signal strength meter in the top right corner of the screen. Now, when you are near a save point, the signal will shoot up to one bar, closer will get two bars and when you're standing on it, you'll have three bars. Now, here's the problem. Once you're on two bars, you're so close (yet so far)! You have to physically stand on the save point to discover it and if the signal has led you to a large open area, with two signal bars, you will have to cover every inch of ground to find a save point. Trust me, when you've just played this game and you want to escape to a much better reality, the last thing you want to do is spend twenty minutes finding a save point. It's like the gaming equivalent of pacing around your house trying get a good enough signal to use your mobile - and we all know how much fun that isn't.

As for the sound, Death By Degrees does quite well in menus with techno tunes that make you feel like kicking some butt. However, their idea of atmospheric music isn't my idea of easy listening. It's supposed to make things a little tenser, but in actual fact, the music heard when you're sneaking about, or when enemies are near, is actually nerve testing. Some of the voices used in conversation between Nina and other people sounds well acted, so there are a few good things here at least.

Death By Degrees is, at the end of the day, a very basic beat em' up. It's just kick, punch, shoot, with the odd focus moves here and there to break up the action. It tries to look atmospheric with a Resident Evil one feel and it tries to sound atmospheric with tense music, but I'm sad to say that both fail miserably. It's just a fighting game, with a good licence but too many problems to make this game a full 360 degrees. For those that are good at maths the game has scored a total 216 degrees and those even better at maths will know not to bother with this spin off title from the best selling series that is Tekken.

Reviewed by Dexter Pearson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).