Game Reviews

Overkill 2

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Overkill 2
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| Overkill 2

Overkill 2 has a pathological obsession with firepower. Every action you perform is designed to increase your collection of gleaming, super-powered weaponry.

Pawing through your catalogue of rotatable, pornographically three-dimensional shooters gives you a sense of how Jeremy Clarkson must feel at a motor show, or how a schoolboy feels when he finds a certain kind of magazine in a hedge.

But, as with those periodicals, the relationships you forge with your guns are paradoxically deeper on the page than in real life. Take them to the shooting range and they turn out to be shallow and meaningless, and they leave you feeling a little bit dirty.

Extended barrel

This is a game about shooting things. Lots of things. All of the things, in fact. You're stuck in one spot, your gun of choice hovering in front of you. A stick at the bottom-left of the screen lets you aim, and a button at the bottom-right lets you fire.

Armoured terrorists wander in from the left and right, aiming their own hand cannons in your direction. Kill one and a bar at the top-left of the screen fills up a little. Once you've filled up this murder counter you've completed a wave and you get given some cash and goodies.

You spend this cash on adding bits to your gun - a barrel here, a larger magazine there - to increase the damage you do. You're stuck with a weedy little pistol to begin with, and you'll need to grind for a good long while if you don't want to spend anything on IAPs to increase your coffers.

The extent to which Overkill 2 worships firearms is encapsulated by the screenshot function in the upgrade screen. Pose your new gun at a sexy angle, tap a couple of buttons, and you'll grab an image to show off to your friends and fellow sociopaths.

Jammed

The problem is that actually using your glistening metallic hand blasters is really rather dull. There are three levels with 20 waves each, but the game gets repetitive after about eight minutes, leaving you shooting away at the same goons to gain XP and more bling for your guns.

If you enjoy games with a fetishistic focus on weaponry then you'll probably find a lot to like in Overkill 2. What you won't find is a coherent and entertaining shooter - just a trudge through a quagmire of generic terrorists that gets dull far too quickly.

Overkill 2

For all of Overkill 2's obsession with weaponry, there isn't enough of an actual game in here to keep you interested
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.