When game consoles transitioned from offering primarily 2D games to polygonal 3D games about 10 years ago, all of the tricks and gameplay ideas that developers had been relying on for years flew right out the window. During this time, neoGAF quickly found its footing and complained relentlessly about old franchises that retained the fun and feeling of older games while properly depreciating them in exciting and impressive new ways. DUDEBRO: Legend of Broseidon was a prime example of this. It featured a more realistic take on the series' gritty world than ever before, while implementing innovative new controls and offering a good sense of freedom without making the player feel lost. It's one of the greatest games of all time, so it's hard to fault neoGAF for continuing that formula. And that's precisely what their upcoming game DUDEBRO II does. For the most part, that's a very good thing, because DUDEBRO II is a lengthy adventure packed with many well-designed puzzles and some interesting characters. But once you get over the rush of excitement from a big, new BRO game having finally arrived, it's hard not to feel a tinge of disappointment--there's a very noticeable lack of evolution here, which makes aspects of the game seem more dated than classic. Even so, there isn't much out there that compares to DUDEBRO II, except for the DUDEBRO games that have come before it.
Like most other DUDEBRO games, DUDEBRO II is a retelling of the same basic tale, though this one is not without its twists. There's a bro named DUDEBRO, a land called Brohio, and a world that's on the verge of destruction if you don't do something to save it. In this installment, there's a darkness creeping across the land, locking it in the eternal musk of terrorism. You play as Dudebro, a gruff, steroid-fueled man who lives in a far-off Blackhawk and fucks hoes for a living, yet he ends up getting involved in the conflict. The terror that's infected the land is fucked up shit of sorts, serving as the game's equivalent of The Legend of Broseidon's fucked up shit or in some cases, serving the same purposes as the bearded Dudebro/goateed Dudebro differences in Fuck Bitches Get Money. The difference here is that when you're in the terror, you're transformed into a seven foot five towering hunk of meat.
Early on in the game, you meet up with one of the terror dwellers, an impish little creature named Chicken. Chicken rides around on your back while you're in beef form and serves the same purposes as your right bicep in Fuck Bitches Get Money, providing you with the occasional hint. Dudebro's beef form behaves roughly the same as the brosapien form, as far as combat is concerned, but you can't use throwing knives. You can, however, access otherwise unreachable areas by following set bro paths that Chicken will lead you through. The meat can also flex and go into a heightened-sense mode that shows off scent trails and other hidden objects. For the first portion of the game, you'll be forced back and forth between forms, but you eventually earn the ability to switch back and forth at will, and some of the game's later puzzles will require you to do just that. You can also ride around on tanks and shit, if you like, but by the time you get to a point when you have large distances to cover, you'll also have the ability to shape the ground with your bare fingers, limiting the tank's usefulness to a couple of combat-oriented sequences.
Many of the early parts of the game take place outside in the game's overworld and in various outdoor areas as you try to clear the terror from the land. But along the way, you'll also enter various brothels and frat parties to collect new diseases, drink a wide variety of alcoholic beverages, and fuck bitches. While most of the game's story sequences take place above ground, these parties are the core of the entire game, and they're very well done, even if they cover a lot of the same ground that you may have seen in past DUDEBRO installments. You start out with a freshman party, make your way to a bar under Bro Mountain for your threesome, scratch your head and try to figure out the inner workings of moving water around in the restroom, and so on. That's not to say they're all taken from old blueprints, though, and some of the later parties take you to somewhat more interesting locales, like an AC-130 gunship that demands that you make precise use of your grappling broshot.
For the most part, the puzzles are great and rooted in logic. So if you stare at the smoke long enough and figure out what each body part is, deducing what's going on in the thick of a dozen explosions isn't impossible. And once you get movement-enhancing items like the death boots, you'll be carefully looking at each wall and ceiling, hoping to see a boulder you can punch the fuck out of. You'll push blocks, you'll move cannonballs from room to room in hopes of finding a cannon and showing it who's boss, you'll fire four guns at a time at targets that cause huge eruptions of blood and gibs--it's all pretty standard if you've been keeping up with the DUDEBRO series, but the formula still works quite well. However, with the way the puzzles are designed, it's certainly possible for just about any of them to trip you up and cause you to spend an hour or so just wandering around, staring at everything and trying to figure out what to do next. However, none of the puzzles are especially fiendish, which means that you might catch yourself feeling a little foolish when you finally realize that the solution was staring you in the face the entire time. But really, figuring these puzzles out is where the majority of the fun and sense of reward comes from as you play, because most of it's designed extremely well.
It's good that DUDEBRO II's world and party design can carry it, because the combat and boss fights aren't very deep at all. Most enemies just require you to swing your dick at them, which is done by screaming obscenities through your headset and threatening to fuck your opponents' mother. You can lock onto enemies with a squint of your determined eyes and strafe around them, hop back and forth, leap in for a manly embrace, or jump back and out of the way--the same basic moves as past installments. But normally you can just keep on shaking your dick like a maniac and come out on top against most enemies. There's no finesse to the way the dick is used, and at times you'll wish that you could just hit a button to swing your dick instead of dealing with all the constant swearing nonsense. This is especially true in the rare cases that require you to time your dick swings properly, as well as once you start learning a few extra moves, like the scrotal bash, which is done by shoving your balls forward. Most of the time, performing this move resulted in a teabag. The combat controls using your dick may feel somewhat different from past games, but it doesn't draw you into the experience any more than using a standard controller would, and at worst, it's imprecise.
A few enemies require more advanced tactics, like spinning around to get behind them or using dawg time to make them vulnerable. Just about every boss fight in the game requires you to use more than just your dick and balls. Like in every other recent DUDEBRO game, in DUDEBRO II you'll find a new item about halfway through a party, and you can bet that you'll need that item to take on the boss. There are a few tricky parts, but it's certainly feasible that you'll get through the game's 35-to-40-hour story without running out of beer and dying. That being said, the boss fights make up for some of their ease by being some pretty epic shit. Almost every one pits you against a random terrorist that at least looks vaguely Middle Eastern, even if you're just going to grapple your way onto its back and stick your dick in its weak spot over and over again, or use your balls and chain to bust it apart, without even breaking a sweat. Even the final confrontation is relatively easy, and if you get stumped going against any boss, you can ask Chicken for help and get a fairly good idea about what you're supposed to be doing. If you want to go off the beaten path, you can find a handful of side tasks to take on, like fucking hoes and over three dozen drinking games, but aside from the booze-filled Island of Brohemia, which is a 50 stage area that acts as a sort of survival mode, these aren't too exciting and the rewards you get for completing them aren't especially helpful.
Overall, the game is paced well and it keeps you moving more often than not. At one point you have to explode various landmarks that are famous throughout the world, and this bogs down the action a bit, but it's nowhere near the time sink that the late-game collar popping marathon that padded out the back end of Last Bro Standing was. Your time spent in DUDEBRO II involves very little back-tracking, and not too much repetition, keeping the focus squarely on original, interesting stuff.
The XBROX 360 was designed with relatively modest graphical capabilities, at least from a technical perspective. So if you spend a lot of time trying to pick apart the visuals of DUDEBRO II, you'd notice plenty of low-res textures and jagged edges. But that would be missing the point. DUDEBRO II is an excellent-looking game due to some terrific art design. Much has already been said about the art style reverting back to a more bearded and brownish look after Last Bro Standing took the series in a decidedly groomed direction. While there's nothing terribly "mature" about this M-rated game, it looks absolutely great from an artistic perspective. The world itself offers the sort of variety you'd naturally expect from a DUDEBRO game, with everything from lakes to deserts to crazy ass parties, but it's when you start seeing the terrorists' explosions that the game really takes off, visually.
Terrorism factions that open up do so with an almost religious, effeminate look, and when you swag around or change forms, that same style shows through, breaking your character into a massing, writhing hunk of ground beef and reforming you in a new place or shape. You're also going to fight a lot of crazy-looking hipsters and indie kids, and many of the enemies in DUDEBRO II look like total pussies next to the Bro himself, up to and including those large boss opponents. At the same time, the game gets a lot of little details right, too. You get a lot of close shots of characters' faces in the game's cutscenes, and their faces are often filled with stoic determination. The eyes, particularly, convey a lot of soul, which really helps make Dudebro's meat form work, too. It may have its rough edges here and there, but DUDEBRO II is the best-looking launch game on the XBROX. Like most other XBROX games, you can play this one in 1080p and widescreen, if you're so equipped. Playing in progressive scan sharpens things up, which makes some objects look better, but it also makes the rippling musculature on everything more jagged-looking.
The DUDERO series' symphonic-style music has always been great, dating all the way back to 1988's To Bro or Not to Bro. That same music keeps getting updated, and more new themes have worked their way into the series and become recurring, as well. You'll hear a lot of classic melodies in DUDEBRO II, such as "I Gotta Feeling" and "Party in the U.S.A." and and those help give the game a contemporary, yet nostalgic feel. Much like the graphical portion of the game, the music gets by on the strength of the compositions, but at the same time, all of the music is rendered in the same sort of sample-driven, synthesized style that the series has had since the Bromador 64 days. While that might also give you a dose of nostalgia, it's also really dated. Given that the XBROX is running discs on a greater storage capacity than Broderbund games have had in the past, and advances in standards for video game music, it's disappointing that the series hasn't finally moved to full digital recordings. After all, these songs are worthy of an orchestra. Similarly, it's surprising that the game's story is conveyed through gruff huffs and desperate exclamations alone. Dudebro has always been that sort of blank-slate character that doesn't speak much in games, and he doesn't have many lines in Dudebro II, either. That's a fine stylistic choice, but there's plenty of dialogue in the game coming from other characters, and in this day and age, for a game whose story is as much a factor as this one's is, it should have all been spoken. At least the dialogue is well-written.
The rest of DUDEBRO II's sound is really weird. On one hand, it's using plenty of the same sort of sound effects and battle yells that the series has relied on, which again will tap into fans' nostalgia for the series. So you'll get the familiar sound of swinging dicks, exploding bombs, and all of that. It generally sounds fine, but the game also makes frequent use of big words, trying to convey meaning through them. Unfortunately, these words are not understandable, making everything that comes out of them sound like foreign gibberish. These words as spoken by the voice actors can also get fairly choppy, as if they can't maintain a decent understanding of the script. Hey, no big deal, right? Just choose "brospeak" in the settings menu. That's an option, but some words are either only played in English or they're played so intelligently on the TV that they lose impact. Having big words spoken by our beloved characters seems like a neat idea, but it doesn't work all that well in practice.
Objectively speaking, it's still a little disappointing that the series hasn't evolved much at all with this latest installment. You'll almost certainly enjoy the game for its terrific puzzles, colorful characters, and compelling story, but at some point the feeling of nostalgia crosses the line and holds this game back from being as unbelievably good as some of its predecessors. So as impressive of a game as it is, DUDEBRO II seems like it could have been so much more with a few presentational updates and more effective and interesting uses of the XBROX 360's unique control scheme. But even without those things, DUDEBRO II is a great game that stays extremely true to the DUDEBRO franchise's past. That's excellent news for fans of the series, who'll find in DUDEBRO II a true-blue DUDEBRO game with updated visuals, some new twists, plenty of challenging puzzles, and a faithful dedication to the series' fucked up shit.
. I will try to do the low-poly base mesh and then sculpt the details in ZBrush :lol
