Curvaceous Tekken fighter Nina Williams gets her very own spin-off action/adventure game in Death by Degrees. Sadly, this game hits the console with all the style of a fresh buffalo chip dropping to the dusty prairie floor. In Death by Degrees Nina plays an undercover operative placed aboard a cruise ship owned by a nefarious organization. She is the “sweeper” in a three-person team that has been sent to gather information on the organization. Her cover is a fighting tournament (What else would it be? The way she dresses, perhaps a hooker convention?) and, when things go badly with the other team members, she is locked up by her hosts.

What follows is a convoluted, terribly clichéd, ill-paced story that will probably be of no interest to anyone. It doesn’t matter anyway. The story seems to just be a device to allow Nina to plod through some really poor gameplay that would make Resident Evil fans, whose brains have been turned to mush by the horrendous remote-control-tank controls of that game, get a burst of nostalgia for 3D games as they never should have been.

Nina Williams is a fighter, right? So the strongest part of the game should be the fighting system. Wrong! The fighting system uses the right analog stick to both attack and block, depending on the timing and duration of the stick manipulation, and the left analog stick to evade. The left analog stick also moves Nina around, by the way. This dual mapping of functions to the same control input makes for a very imprecise system. It is often very hard to tell whether you’ve just tapped the stick or pushed it. What is the difference? The difference is executing a walk-in-a-direction when you meant to flip out of the way of an enemy attack. The difference is also attacking when you meant to guard. What it makes the fights degenerate into is wildly flailing the sticks about without much thought to what you’re really doing.

The much touted “Critical Strike” special attack, which lets Nina directly target certain vital organs when her “focus” has been built up, doesn’t really add much to the fighting either. The effect that accompanies the critical strike looks like something out of that TV show CSI as they illustrate with inside body views how the victim of the week bit the big one. Unfortunately, actually pulling off the critical strike does not even guarantee that the baddies are going to bite it. They are just as likely to get back up again and keep fighting.

Add some quite wonky camera controls, only slightly above-average graphics, voice acting that is little better than House of the Dead’s, and load times that are so slow and frequent that they would test the patience of the Dali Llama himself, and what you have is a game that is a chore to play and probably really should not have seen store shelves. Sorry, Namco. It was a noble effort to combine an action/adventure game with a fighting game based around a recognized video game babe, but the end results just don’t add up to a game that even diehard Tekken fans are going to get much pleasure from.