Celebrity Deathmatch, a late-night MTV production, famed for pitting animated celebrity likenesses against each other in a bloody battle to the death. Any wonder why it’s popular? The premise of the series in itself is brilliant enough to inspire a videogame, not to mention the fact that the show animates the characters in clay, and features hilariously wacky attacks based on the celebrity’s established persona and past work. I myself am quite a fan of the series, currently watching repeats thanks to my newly purchased Freeview box, so as you can imagine, I was quite pleased to learn that the series was spawning a videogame, and had high-hopes for the title.

            The title features a Deathmatch mode, with the option to pit the fighters of your choice in a 2-player Vs. or play against a CPU, a create-a-player mode and “Episode” mode, which acts as a series of Celebrity Deathmatch episodes, each with three pre-determined fights. Progressing through the Episode mode will unlock hidden characters, arenas and further episodes. This mode is unfortunately desperately short, and can be completed within a night. It seems reasonable then to assume that the game was designed primarily for multi-player use, but with only a 2-player option and no online features, things don’t look promising.

            Although the game appears to be a wrestling title, it plays more like a one-on-one beat-‘em-up, with each character having three basic attacks, one special attack, one MTV attack (which can only be executed when your MTV meter fills) and a few finishing moves. The “grapple” when executed launches a cut-scene of you dealing damage to your opponent and appears to be more of a throw attack, as it is totally irreversible. The fighting, although appearing to be quite well structured with good collision detection and a pleasing amount of frames per animation, sends me reeling right back to the 8-bit days, rapidly hitting buttons rather than concentrating my attacks as nine times out of ten they’ll cause damage, and the one time they may be blocked they still stop any retaliation. It is possible on the earlier episodes to pin your opponent for an entire match and not allow them to execute a single attack.

The game features a very nice variety of characters (including Mr. T, Marilyn Manson, Frankenstein, Carmen Electra and Justin Timberlake); each well designed and with their own suited gimmicks. However, they don’t seem to be particularly well balanced, with the Hollywood Monsters and fictional characters seemingly far better both for control and fighting ability, could it be that the game was designed this way, and then had the Celebrity Deathmatch tag affixed? The graphics of the fighters are well animated, if rather blocky, and represent their clay counterparts respectfully. However, the narrators, Stacey and the background cast are absolutely unforgivable. Dull, lifeless, badly animated blocks represent the audience in the Deathmatch arena, and the Hula girls at the Volcano arena could easily be drawn on the Game Boy Advance.

The sound of the title although being at a reasonable quality, is more than annoying. The narrator’s commentary is dull and often misplaced. The intro’s are quite poor and only really display an evidence of clever scripting during the predetermined episodes. Although the sound effects are often humorous, they dull quickly too.

The title shows little evidence of been worthy of the licence it bears, and having reportedly been in production for nearly two years, I can hardly commend the team and say their time was well spent. The average-ness of the whole package is, to be blunt, pointless. Any genre you wish to attempt to place this game in would come up with at least thirty more impressive similar titles. The effort could have easily been achieved on the Nintendo64 in every respect and possibly even the PSone if the graphics were to be toned down. Average fun, but short and repetitive, disappointing to say the least.