I like ladies. I really do. I also mean that I occasionally like them in a completely rude and unprintable sense, and prefer them to be damn attractive, and with very few clothes. Consider then that the first shots of action in DOA: Xtreme 2 involve a close up of a pair of barely-covered breasts, followed – for good measure – by a close in arse shot. I should, theoretically, be in a dreamworld.

Yet DOA:X2, sadly (at least for the developers), exists in a world of free Internet pornography and lots of it. So you’d hope they have a few more tricks up their sleeves than just showing more and more virtual flesh. Checked that score at the bottom of the review yet? Then you might have an idea what’s coming.

The gist of DOA:X2 is to take the not unattractive girls of the Dead or Alive fighting games, and transpose them into a different genre. It sort-of-worked on the original Xbox, with the pleasant-enough Dead Or Alive Xtreme Volleyball. But DOA:X2 unwisely chooses to branch out into several different events, and in the process it loses its focus.

The action in the main ‘story mode’, as such, takes place on New Zack Island, where you first pick your character – all female, none older than their twenties – and then you can promptly take them shopping. This is, however it first appears, not just about cosmetics and aesthetics. The sports shop, for instance, while not afraid to stock a collection of skimpy swimsuits, sells craft to take down to the marina for high speed racing. We’re not sure that offer to gift wrap everything is entirely necessary, though.

The game hand-leads you through events at first, letting you try most things once and generally get you used to the mechanics of the game. Once you’ve been taken round the island, you’re pretty much free to try whatever you like, whenever you like. As the events vary quite wildly in quality, though, we suspect you’ll concentrate your efforts in just one or two areas.

So let’s start with something the last game got pretty much right (with reservations); the volleyball. Sadly, in DOA:X2, it’s kyboshed fairly quickly by an unfathomable camera angle choice. It’s as if the camera has been positioned for eye-candy, rather than gameplay purposes, and the volleyball pays a price as a result. Whilst there are still an impressive range of moves to try, it’s tricky to judge the proper flight of the ball, and thus luck overtakes judgement more often than it should. Gone is the automatic positioning of the previous game, and the end result is something that just doesn’t really work.

You’ve also got the fun of trying to find a partner to play volleyball with. It’s not a bad part of DOA:X2, but it will test the intolerant. To persuade someone to be your partner generally involves buying them gifts tailored to their likes and interests. Be prepared to hear variants on the word ‘no’ a lot.

As for the further minigames? Well, the water slide we enjoyed, but not for long. The idea here, and you need to buy a ticket to ride the thing in the first place, is to place your backside on a rubber ring and get the best time going round a snake-like water slide. Only it’s not that simple. One false move and you’re off the slide and it’s game over, leaving you to choose whether to ride it again or swagger off to something else. There’s a real feeling of pace to it, though, yet we couldn’t help be reminded of the 8-bit ‘classic’ Rick Dangerous, where the only way to avoid an obstacle was to hit it, and remember about it for next time. The frustration takes the edge off the fun.

The tug-of-war, meanwhile, is simplistic in the extreme. Basically, the only tactics at your disposal are to pull the rope, or feint. Choose which to do at the right time, and it’s pretty much luck to judge it, and you win. Don’t, and you lose.

Just as straightforward, but far more fun, is the pool hopping. This is easy enough – you have to hop from one end of the swimming pool to the other, by jumping on coloured floats. The colours of the floats correspond to the colour of the buttons on your game controller, so the idea is simply to hit the colour of your next float to progress. The only downside is that one mistake, again, equals the end of the game, and that’s daft. We enjoyed the pool hopping a lot apart from that, and we’d have far preferred a time penalty rather than an abrupt end to a race. At it stands, it’s still one of the more enjoyable minigames.

It’s a damn sight better than butt battle though, where two competitors stand, quite literally, cheek-to-cheek on a floating raft. The idea is, using nothing more than the power of your rear end, to knock your opponent off the raft before they do it to you. Unfortunately, there are limited attack options at your disposal, and this again relegates the game down to a simple game that relies far too much on chance.

Things improve again, albeit not as much as you’d hope, with the jet ski racing. The races don’t last long, and they’re little more than entertaining sideshows with little long term appeal, but they’re fun while they last. The graphics could use a little work, though.

Next? A silly little beach flags segment, that lasts even less time and just involves racing across a beach. The pack is then rounded off with a passable casino segment, which – along with the events – is another way to win cash to buy gifts to win other women over.

If you’ve not guessed by now, DOA:X2 is a bit of a mess. It happily borrows where it wants to from its predecessor, and outside of the cut scenes, the graphics just aren’t as strong as they should be. Throw in the failure to include one minigame with long term appeal and you end up with a disparate mess. Even taking into account that personal bias we discussed, the asking price can easily be used to buy a different, better sporting game, and a truckload of pornography instead. On both counts, you’re much more likely to be satisfied.