A very watered down Bloody Palace experience
The first Fear Unlimited was very promising, I remember reviewing a few years ago and loving the feel of a 2D Devil May Cry game. However, FUA delivers a much more stale experience that simply fades too quickly.
The graphics are decent, you can tell what's what. Well apart from the weapon that's looks like Agni&Rudra slept with magnetic tonfas, a bit weird but I welcome unique weaponry.
Sound is pretty good, BGM is great for fighting hordes, and the sound effects are well used.
However, the main suffering for the game is it's gameplay.
Like Fear Unlimited, you can't easily change direction when in the air or comboing. That means a lot of the time you'll take cheap hits just because you weren't able to turn around to attack the enemy. With both melee weapons working almost the same, it's mind boggling why an ordinance weapon wasn't implemented to make up for this control scheme.
Getting style is a joke. Prop Shredder, High Time, and all you have to do is Aerial Rave and switch weapons constantly. I didn't figure out if there were any more advanced attacks (charge moves, down moves, etc) considering how utterly owning the aerial combat is for the AI.
Saying that, the boss type enemies have an extremely cheap tail whip attack; it hits so high that unless you've peaked the height for your Air Hike, you're likely to get hit. That's a bit stupid considering I can only see a tail that's about six foot long, as opposed to the twenty-odd feet my Dante-esque warrior is supposed to be jumping to.
Overall, I couldn't play after thirty minutes. The lack of story, which is what really drove Fear Unlimited 1 IMO and made it such a good game, Also the lack of motivation to do anything; it's not like DMC where you can mess around creating some combos in the meantime, or practice against a variety of enemies. The enemies are very DMC 3, having only one or two attacks and generally being punching bags. You hardly have that many moves, no variety of ground combo, and it's almost always preferable to stay in the air using the ultra-stylish combo (come on, I can rack up 100,000 style points in a MINUTE?!)
Decent, but very quickly forgotten. Hopefully the Fear Unlimited 2 game will rectify some of the control problems, balance the combat and style system out more, and deliver the next part of the story.