NOT
Story is a Waste of Time
Anarchy Reigns is about two different people looking for a man named Maximillian Caxton, who is on the run after his wife is found dead. This forces his old unit to look for him (White Side) and the infamous chaser Jack Cayman (Black Side) to settle a score with him. However both of the stories are pretty lacking in content.
While I can’t get into detail about this due to spoilers, I can tell you that there isn’t a lot of story. For instance while looking for Max, you don’t a lot of questions or effort put forth into finding him. In fact only the first scene and one fight actually relates to finding max, where as the rest mostly focus on the side characters. This would be great, but most of the side characters are just people you encounter. With the exception of Jack and to a far lesser degree Leo (main characters), you’re really given no reason to care about anyone else. This is due to a real lack of effort applied to the story, so even when the twists do occur, it’s quite difficult to feel anything towards the scenes.
Feels Lacking and Could Use Some Polish
You maybe surprised to learn that Anarchy Reigns is something of an open world game, but none of these elements are really expanded upon. For instance despite looking for someone, you don’t actually interact with anyone or have the ability to enter buildings. The only things you can do is run around killing people till the next mission pops up. This might sound okay, but the mission count is rather low.
There are a total of roughly 60 missions, which might not sound bad, but is actually fairly low. Most of the missions are survive a period of time or kill X enemies, though it does branch off into other things. These include objectives like racing, collecting items, helicopter kills, fighting on a berserker, but these are far and few between. Over half of them are just fighting some sort of boss, so it’s a pretty short experience. I would wager it takes only 5 hours to do every mission if you skip story.
In addition to some area’s lacking content, the game could use some polish. During a number of story missions you will have a brief conversation with your enemy, but there appears to be absolutely no effort to lip sync the scenes. This can get especially annoying when the character is moving their mouth, but nothing is being said.
Difficulties Are Too Different
Have you ever heard the story of goldilocks and the three bears? If not, there is a part where she is trying to eat porridge. However one is too hot and another too cold, but the last one was just right. This is pretty much the case for Anarchy Reigns.
If you play the game on easy, then the AI is an absolute joke. The AI will almost never block, has virtually no life and I would be absolutely confused if someone had any sort of issue with this mode. On the other hand you have hard mode, which is pretty much the complete opposite of easy. The AI does nothing but block, you have virtually no life, their guard is nearly impossible to break, and the AI is extremely aggressive. To put it into understandable terms, the rifle item (5 shots) can take away 80% or so of a bosses life, where as it might do 10% if you’re lucky on hard. If neither difficulty appeals to you, then you always have normal. Unlike the two extreme, normal requires some blocking / dodging, though you can also win fights being aggressive. Both you and the AI have a fair amount of health, so you CAN make a mistake or two and win. To put it another way, even if you can beat normal without a retry, you still might not be ready to experience hard mode.
VERDICT
Anarchy Reigns might have an amazing online experience, but the offline experience is lacking. Sadly it’s to a point where there is almost no point in buying, unless you intend to play with others online. Some simple changes like an offline multiplayer would be grand, but sadly you’re limited to online. Thankfully online covers every base, though it’s hard to say if the community will survive.
[Editors Note: Anarchy Reigns was reviewed on the Xbox 360 platform. The game was provided to us by the publisher for review purposes.]