Review by: Brian Rowe

When we last saw Travis Touchdown, he had sliced his way to become the #1 assassin of Santa Destroy, but there is only one way to go when you’re at the top of the charts. Assassins from far, wide, and beyond the realm of sanity have gathered for a new game, and the organizers of this bloody event have seen fit to throw Travis to the bottom of the ladder. Coincidentally, the new lead assassin just killed Travis’ best friend. Snap! Someone’s getting played.

Desperate Struggle is a cavalcade of the most climactic boss-fights the Wii has ever seen. In his bid for revenge, Travis faces a hip-hop mogul with a rocket-powered ghetto-blaster, a cherub-faced pyromaniac, and a squad of mechanized cheerleaders. These are only the openers. 15 bosses await Travis and each is more psychotic than the previous. The long grinds of hacking through henchman have been significantly reduced to keep the violence flowing at a supersonic pace, which makes the simplicity of the bosses all the more disappointing.

There is an extra-strength Bitter difficulty for second go-arounds, but seasoned combatants will ache for a true challenge on the normal setting. Per the unwritten rules of brawlers, each boss abides by a checklist of unmistakable patterns and warnings before attacking. You will take a few hits learning them, but not enough to kill you. Desperate Struggle bears some fantastic surprises, like twin cyborgs that revive each other when given the chance, but boss-fights typically devolve into hack-n-slash routines of evasions and counterattacks. That’s not to say they aren’t massively entertaining though. What boss-battles lack in skill is replaced, or rather over-compensated, with flamboyant assaults to the body and brain.

Desperate Struggle introduces the option of playing with the classic controller, but using the remote and nunchuck is too much fun to pass up. Most of Travis’ slashes and kicks can be gracefully performed with a mild tilt of the remote and a button press. I give you two minutes before you’re flailing your arms and smacking bystanders. It’s simply too hard to resist the orgasmic ballet of light trails and bodily fluids. That description nearly takes a literal turn when Travis’ beam-katana runs out of juice. He turns his back, grabs the hilt, and vigorously shakes and moans in beat with the remote. My roommate picked the wrong time to come home.

Fans of the original will be ecstatic to hear about the addition of dual beam-katanas, and yes, they are every bit as cool as they sound. The wrestling-move finishers, body-splitting death blows, and slow-motion of Darkside are all back. When you think the action can’t possibly go further over the top, Travis turns into a tiger and mauls everyone in the room. Unfortunately, the introduction of Shinobu as a playable character nearly topples the entire experience. She’s as powerful as Travis and much faster, which makes her wholly uninteresting in combat. She also has the ability to jump, sort of, for which Grasshopper Manufacture provides a plethora of inaccurately infuriating platforming segments. It’s a shame that two boss-fights are wasted on her before Travis steps back in.