Dream Publishing is staffed by a number of Dream Factory developers, who were partly responsible for Square's respected Tobal series as well as the more recent, The Bouncer. While The Bouncer was slammed for not being all that the company made it out to be, it still stomps all over Kakuto Chojin as a game (ok, enough with the puns). I have a feeling all the good game designers left the company long ago. This is not Tobal in a pretty package.

Where to begin. Dream Publishing must have missed the several generations of modern 3D fighters which have graced both arcades and consoles. The characters, which range from a Bruce Lee clone, to a fat Spawn-reject of a wrestler, to some super typical stereotypes, are bland, boring and mostly unimaginative. Oh, and each of these characters have what seems like a about a dozen generic moves at their disposal. The lack of moves is confusing, and I can't believe the game would be shoved out the door in this condition. A second "Chojin" style can be selected once story mode is beaten once, but even then, the set of moves is below average. We are talking less technique and depth than even the most ancient of 3D fighters.

Control is a cross between Mortal Kombat and Tekken, with a Low, Medium and High attack button, a Block button and a Move button. Most controller motions and button combinations yield moves which looks and behave nearly the same, and the gameplay absolutely relies on simple single button combos. Health bars are the same as you would expect in any fighter, and the bar also doubles as a Super Move indicator. When this meter build up, you can unleash a not all that powerful, ho-hum super attack by pressing all three buttons. The Move button allows you to break from facing your opponent and run around the relatively small ring. It's useless expect maybe when playing against 2 or 3 other fighters.

Fights all take place gritty looking post-apocalyptic looking rings. Oddly enough, many of the rings look nearly identical, with just some palette swaps, repositioning and small alterations. Most feature a wall of some type immediately surrounding the fighting area, and a big giant bitmap looking beyond that. There is next to no interesting features to see in the environment, other than the occasional decent smoke, rain or lens-flare effect. The walls, which look all dangerous and rusty, are nothing more than simple barriers. Characters cannot be trapped against it, slammed into it, or harmed by it in anyway. When you are seemingly being backed against one, your character even slightly rotates around so he/she is no longer in that position. Even worse is when there is no wall in a certain area, and characters just bump off as if a wall did exist. No ring-outs here.

The only redeeming feature that Kakuto Chojin has is the visuals, and even they are not all that special. The characters, although hideously designed, are well constructed. Thanks to layers and layers of shiny, reflective effects, and high resolution texturing, they look close to being CG rendered. The lighting and shadowing is impressive at first, until you realize that most of the screenshots you have seen, are lies. Only 2 stages, both which have a small grate ceiling, cast dynamic shadows upon the characters. And then it's only a few criss-crossing lines, which are strangely not even cast across the ring surface. Other than those exceptions,and the standard character shadows, there are no other dynamic shadows being thrown about, and the lighting effects appear almost identical regardless of the stage you are fighting on.

The music and voices are very Mortal Kombat-like, although someone should have checked the grammar. Instead of the typical, and more correct, "You Win!/You Lose!" text and voice, you are treated to "You Won!/You Lost!". It just sounds wrong when you first hear it.

The modes are your typical Story, Practice and Vs Modes. Story mode, presumably the meat of the game, just sequentially has you fight each character and a boss. A little one line clip serves as the "story" before each new opponent. Anyone who has played a fighting game in the past 10 years, can play through it for the first time without continuing in less than 10 minutes. Just use one of the combos over and over, and you'll have no real problem. Although the game would be more fun playing with up to 3 other players in a battle royale style fight, I can't even imagine convincing 3 friends to play it.

Kakuto Chojin pales in comparison to the original Virtua Fighter, the first Tekken, and nearly every other 3D fighter created from the early PSX and Saturn days up 'til now. I think even WarGods and Mortal Kombat 4 has more depth and playability than this. Kakuto Chojin is right up there with Rise of the Robots and Shaq Fu. Stay away... not even worth a rental.