The Bouncer

Brings more than just fierce punches and kicks -- it features an engaging story and plenty of gameplay modes that offer a high replay value. Hands down, this is one of the best PS2 games.

It is lacking mostly in the game play department, which frankly, isn't very exciting. It presents little variability and this allows it to get old fairly quick.

The Bouncer is not the next messiah, it's not the next wave of fighting, and frankly, it's not the paradigm for anything really new, except perhaps incredible-looking graphics.

It is one of the sharpest looking PS2 games out right now, but the lack of actual gaming content leaves it with an overall mediocre feel.

Quite possibly the prettiest game I’ve ever seen...But presentation isn’t really the problem here. It’s the gameplay.

While The Bouncer cam puts on a good show, it chooses fashion over function every time. Dramatic camera angles produce awesome screen shots, but as a result you'll spend half the time wondering what's sitting right in front of your face.

One hell of a disappointment and one of the worst experiences I've ever had to endure on my shiny DVD-playing black box.

I recently replayed this game on an emulator and let me tell you that my experience is just as good as it was back in 2001 when I first played it on the PS2. Excellent game, worthy of a remake. Keep in mind that a remake has tons of room for improvement. A great example is Final Fantasy 7 Remake.

A great game for **** music is ok some songs sound to similar **** game has somewhat a good variety of moves that you can use & The characters have unique **** short comings of this party game is in multiplayer the health bars are different for all the characters. When you upgrade moves in the story you lose some moves,it would have been nice to have both.Story overall could have been **** combat mechanics for when you do combo's should have like the Yakuza series & Tekken as far when an open falls when hit enough or hit with a special technique. Personally I would rate this game an 8 but it feels like a 7 or 6.

The Bouncer is a beat-em-up game with mechanics that would have been revolutionary had they not been buried behind idiotic design choices. It reminds me of "Die by the Sword," in that the precise hit detection should have spawned a new genre of sequels and copycats with procedural action gameplay, but was instead lost and forgotten. REVOLUTIONARY: 1) The game has PERFECT hit detection. It feels pixel-based, and it's better than what we have 15 years later today. What this does is it really makes the differences between each attack stand out so you can apply them to the situation, shifting strategies as enemies cluster, or flip. It keeps everything feeling procedural and organic, because the impact angles are always different. 2) Rag-doll physics for all human and cat characters (but not robots). Some beat-em-ups today do this (not enough), but the ragdoll in this game is probably the best I've seen, and at the time any real physics was novel, and they actually affect gameplay. 3) Enemies knock each other over when they collide. In combination with the perfect hit detection and rag-doll-physics, this opens up a world of strategy and replayability. 4) Two NPC allies stay with you almost the entire game and help in fights, although they can knock you down when they're hit. IDIOTIC Design Choices: 1) No cooperative gameplay. The only multiplayer was the versus mode (up to 3-on-3 with 2 computer-controlled allies per, or free-for-all with 4 players). I would have killed for coop gameplay in the survival mode especially. 2) Encounters are way too short (3-5 enemies) before a frequent, overly-long cutscene and another upgrade/save/character-select point. The plot is so insipid you skip cutscenes on the first playthrough, but even that takes time. The characters are dressed for Final Fantasy, meaning they all universally look stupid aesthetically. 3) Walking movement in 3D was stiff, constantly arrested by an auto-lock-on mechanic that made it difficult to position yourself with the precision that the hit detection required. 4) Characters have 8 basic attacks (and paltry few combos) from 4 face buttons; this was one of the only games ever that distinguished between light and hard press on the PS2 controller. Picking attacks like that, rapid-fire in sequence, is just too much to ask from a player in a fast-paced beat-em-up. 5) There are no environmental hazards, ring-outs, or destructible/interactive objects in the environment. It's like the entire game takes place in one room where the background art shifts. 6) An RPG upgrade system, which never works in action videogames because it's always hard to calibrate how upgraded you need to be. So if you save up to buy new moves (which is my bias because I want to see **** least get the throw because it looks cool with the ragdoll effect) or switch characters midway to upgrade them, the game becomes impossible. 7) Then there are a few pointless sections without enemies or puzzles, just corridors with only one exit and literally nothing to do but proceed there; it's bizarre. 8) There's no "continue" option when you die (you have to load a save from the main menu) which just aggravates the steep difficulty curve and cheap bosses that begin appearing at the halfway point. 9) The game lasts 3 hours, although only 1 hour is actual new gameplay, the rest is cutscenes and restarting the same section over and over because of a super-cheap boss. The upshot is a relatively fun game (worth a playthrough or two) with enormously squandered potential. In the 15 years since, only dinky indie games have attempted procedural/organic beat-em-up gameplay, and not nearly as well. What probably went wrong is too much of Square's traditional Final Fantasy RPG influence. It's a shame, "The Bouncer" could have fixed itself into a superb 9/10 game just by adding cooperative play and deleting "features": delete the cutscenes, delete the RPG mechanics (spawn every character with all his moves), delete the robotic enemies, delete the invisible wall that keeps enemies from "ring-outs." One more step beyond that--add in environmental hazards, make the arcade (not "story"; literally zero cutscenes would be better) mode longer, and maybe design characters that didn't look like they were caught inside a Lisa Frank warehouse explosion--and we're talking a perfect 10/10 game.

The only redeeming quality this game has is style. A lot of this style is carried forward into the Kingdom Hearts games. Other than that, it has no substance. The gameplay is a clunky Virtua Fighter mess. It is honestly embarrassing and there isn't that much gameplay. It can be beated in under 2 hours.

The Bouncer is the closest thing the video game world has seen to "The Room"; writing bordering on parody, gameplay bordering on non-existent, and its only redeeming quality is that it's over shortly after it begins.