The graphics in Kengo range from quite beautiful to rather unimpressive. The environments that you battle in, while nowhere near as expansive as I would have liked, are nonetheless very well detailed and quite enjoyable to look at. The character models, on the other hand, are relatively detailed but a little herky-jerky in their animations. You'll also be seeing a whole lot of the same characters, as you fight your way through ranks of students of the various dojos. There's not a whole lot of graphical variety in Kengo. It doesn't help that the camera moves erratically throughout the battle, changing the control scheme and making your life miserable.

And don't mind the gratuitous beefcake in the waterfall mini-game, although I think it's rather silly that the warriors even have the loincloth for that scene. I somehow doubt that bit of historical accuracy.

The sound effects in the game are solid. There are lots of grunts, of course, and the sound of wood-on-wood and metal-on-metal, along with appropriate slashing/banging sounds for whatever you're hitting with your weapon. There isn't any variety in the weapons you use, so there's not a lot of sound effects to hear. The voice acting, where it occurs, is in the original Japanese. Kudos must be given for that decision. There is really no music to speak of, at least not in the battles. Environmental sounds are the rule, with birds chirping and whatnot. It's all pretty low-key, but it works for the setting. Just don't expect a symphonic suite.

All right, I'll admit it. I was a complete and total Bushido Blade addict. I played the hell out of that game. I don't generally like fighters -- something about button combos and hordes of character just doesn't really impress me. But the deep gameplay of Bushido Blade had me hooked, and the fact that you could kill someone with a single well-placed swipe impressed the hell out of me. Sure, there were a few cheap character combos (Mikado with the nodachi, anyone?), but the game was highly enjoyable.

Kengo, by the same developers, has lost a lot of that charm. It's gained a little back of its own, but in the end, the game is an unfulfilling experience. There's some fun to be had here, but you have to dig pretty deep to find it. I can distance myself from the fun I had with Bushido Blade, but that doesn't make this game any better -- it just leaves me with nothing else to compare it to.

There are three play modes in Kengo. The core of the game is in the single-player experience. After picking one of three warriors, you must pick the dojo you wish to go to school at. Each dojo has its own set of moves, and you should pick one whose moves compliment your warrior. After picking your dojo, the game proper starts.

The first part of the game consists of training against the members of your own dojo. After doing a few quick training lessons, you go up against a series of students, until you eventually fight the master of the dojo himself. You can also fight other dojos, to learn their skills and get their special swords. As you fight opponents, you gain points in a number of statistics, which control how fast you are, how strong your attacks are, and other such goodies.

To raise the maximum level in these stats, you must do various training exercises. These are a departure from the actual combat, and I found them to be the most entertaining part of the game.

The combat consists of a single attack button, a block button, a parry button, and a 'ki' button. You can have up to four stances at a time, and you execute the three moves in a stance by tapping the attack button. There are a few more subtleties to attacking, but that's the gist. As you fight, your ki meter goes up and down. Once you have an 'excellent' sword, you can use its built-in ki attack and do some major damage to your opponents.

The core problem with the game comes from the shoddy combat engine. Facing your opponent is an exercise in futility, and I can't tell you how many battles consist of swinging past an opponent, turning, and swinging past again. It's woefully inaccurate, and downright silly to watch. Because almost every move consists of these combos, you'll find yourself wailing on thin air a frighteningly large amount of the time.

There's also no real overarching storyline to the single-player mode. You raise your stats, you fight other dojos, you participate in a tournament. That's just about it.

The other two modes -- a versus mode and a tournament mode -- are more amusing. In the tournament mode, you can use pre-built characters or load your own, and you fight much the same way that you do in any fighting game -- one on one until it ends. The versus mode lets you fight your buddies, and you can use your loaded characters here as well. Both modes are somewhat entertaining, but if you want multiplayer action of the bushido sort, I suggest you stick in your copy of Bushido Blade. (Damn, I referred to it!)

The difficulty of Kengo is all over the map. Some fights are near-trivial, whereas others (who thinks it's fun to fight ten enemies in a row?) are just a major pain in the arse. Fortunately, you gain experience in the single-player mode whether you beat the enemies or not, so you're always improving in your stats and hopefully can become strong enough to beat wherever you're stuck. Almost all of the difficulty comes from fighting with the stupid controls, however, which is unforgivable.

The controls in Kengo are simple enough -- no multi-button attacks or anything fancy like that -- but they're impossible to use consistently. Moving your warrior around and getting him to face how you like is a challenge enough. Getting your attacks to land is another matter entirely. The combat engine is seriously lacking in the 'tight' department, which is a damned shame. The rest of the game, on the other hand, is eminently manageable, and the 'mini-game' training sessions are actually quite entertaining. The camera movement during the battles only makes an annoying situation worse, as the controls flip-flop constantly.

Kengo has potential, but the poor fighting engine kills the game before it really gets to start. If it played like it should have (more like that unmentionable game), this would have been a dead-on winner. As it is, Kengo is only for the hardcore samurai freaks. And even then, it's definitely a rental before a purchase.