Riviera: The Promised Land review

Riviera's a convention-breaking fantasy RPG in which you play a fallen angel who teams up with four women (remember it's a fantasy) to prevent demons from invading the world. The combat system is fresh, if a bit uncooperative. And the game constantly moves forward, althoughsome would sayit's because it doesn't let you explore the environments on your own - each screen has several things you can look at and up to four directions you can go and that's it. No moving around , you just click the button and your guy does the moving on his own. The hands-off approach left us wanting more control over the characters, especially when it came to the rigid combat system.

You choose four items to use for each fight, and they determine what attacks you can use. If you bring, say, a broadsword then whoever knows how to handle a broadsword will be able to use that weapon to take broadsword-sized hunks out of your enemies. If you bring four pink ribbons to the fight, you'll be stuck trying to give the enemy cute looks to death. Also, not everyone will know how to use every weapon, and to limit things even further, only three people to fight at a time. But the real humdinger is that you can't select which enemy to attack. Your target depends on the weapon you attack with no matter how illogical that target may be.

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Above: We are about to get hit witha poison arrow trap because we just can't remember which button is triangle quickly enough

Pick the right set of demon crushing equipment and you'll earn an S rank at the end of the battle. Pat yourself on the back. After each fight you get a score, from C (you suck) to S (you're the best). The scores reward you with coveted TP points. Like we mentioned, there are only a few things to do on most exploration screens, and most areas are simply made up of a handful of screens linked together. However, instead of being able to simply click through every explorable thing in the game, TP points are used to look at things that might be useful. We liked having to choose whether we looked at the big flower or the strange mushroom without knowing what the outcome would be. (Hint: big flower restores all your hp). Along with the TP, you frequently have to play one of several reaction based mini-games that test your skill with a PSPfor everything fromavoiding a traps to throwingrocks accurately.