Rengoku 2: The Stairway to H.E.A.V.E.N

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Not looking very heavenly

Rengoku II: The Stairway to H.E.A.V.E.N. looks to be ready to repeat the sins of its predecessor. Like the (terrible) original, you'll play as a battle android (called an A.D.A.M.) and fight your way through endless hordes of other battle androids. The battles are contained in an eight level tower of boxy rooms, with each of the first seven floors corresponding to one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Apparently, peace has made the battle androids archaic, so they fight to the death in the tower of Rengoku.

Yeah, it has problems, but there is enough good stuff to have gotten us at least a little bit interested. The character designs are still strange and interesting; the freedom to take both arms, the chest, and even the head of your A.D.A.M. and put weapons in their places lets you come up with some wonderfully bizarre monster robot designs. However, just like Rengoku, that's about all that really recommends Rengoku II so far.

If you die on any tower level, you immediately return to the beginning without the weapons you had equipped. Therefore, every time you die, you have to teleport back to the beginning of the floor. That means every time you die, you have to sit through a bunch of load screens. Once you get back to the beginning of the floor you were on, you have to fight back to where you died to get your weapons back. Either bare-fisted or with second-tier weapons equipped, these corpse runs seem just as frustrating as the seminal title's were.