As soon as gameplay begins, it's made loud and clear that this game has more in common with Virtua Fighter, Tekken and Toshinden than with KI Gold, Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter. The movement is silky smooth. The music is dramatic and involving. The gameplay has a nice flow to it.

I found Dark Rift's characters refreshing compared to other N64 fighters. Each one moves differently, and most are a lot of fun to play. They are different from one another, fight differently, move differently, and add variety to the game.

Instead of the punch-kick-block gameplay of most fighters, Dark Rift uses vertical and horizontal weapon strikes as well as kicking and blocking. The result is gameplay that feels almost like swordplay rather than hand to hand combat. The sense of what attack to use under what circumstances becomes intuitive after relatively little play. Once this sense is developed, gameplay takes on a fluid-like state, as one move flows into the next, setting up a rewarding series of blows to the opponent.

Unlike most fighters, Dark Rift's combos (and most special moves) aren't very difficult to pull off. Most require no memorization and can be found simply by playing. For example, a cool combo may be set off with something as simple as attacking vertically twice, horizontally once, then vertically twice more. These movements are likely to be executed during regular play, and can usually be repeated easily. Many of the moves are executed by double tapping forward and then pushing one of the attack buttons. There are also more complex combos and moves for advanced players. There are no fatalities, just cool moves.

Despite Dark Rift's easy to pick up gameplay, the game itself is not easy. Opponents are chosen at random for a one-player game, and the opponents get better and better as you accumulate wins.

Blocking is difficult. I found deflecting blows using the Right C button unintuitive. It can be frustrating to realize the need to block during an offensive move and get hit before your thumb makes it over to Right C. The button setup can be changed, but the rest of the setup works well enough to leave the blocking button as it is despite the problems in doing so.

Another source of difficulty is that a match between opponents of different sizes often leads to an unfair advantage toward one of the opponents. This calls for a change in fighting style, which gives the game some variety. For example, when facing a larger more powerful opponent, it may be best to use distance attacks and occasionally jump in when the opportunity arrives. Unfortunately, sometimes even changing fighting styles won't work, and at these times the game can become fairly frustrating.

Dark Rift's one-player mode is nice, especially for honing skills, but my favorite part of Dark Rift is the Vs. mode. This is the first fighting game that I've played that gives a really good handicap option to balance out play. Each player can set their health gauge appropriately to even out the gameplay. The fights are often extremely close and exciting. There is one problem with the Vs. mode however: you can't change characters after each bout. Instead, you must wait through a ten second continue countdown to reach the player select screen. This slows down gameplay quite a bit and makes it a bit more difficult to spice things up.

While Dark Rift is definitely an impressive fighting game, it lacks that something special for me to rank it as a classic 3-D brawler like Virtua Fighter. There isn't one big reason why this is so, but rather a combination of subtle things (in addition to blocking problems/character imbalances mentioned earlier) that leave Dark Rift lacking. One of these things is the lack of voice in the game. The characters themselves never speak, and victory animations are accompanied by weird sounds along the lines of "Huh, ha, huh!" The announcer doesn't announce each fight (in fact, he says very little at all), and the game feels somewhat quiet without much speech.

On the graphics side, certain N64 features were turned off to yield a higher framerate. This means that there are often slight glitches in the polygons that give the impression that the game is a super high quality PSX game. The actual detail on the characters (as well as the variety of colors) is disappointingly low, but still quite good.

Finally, the story of the game isn't a big part of gameplay, and the motivation to play the one-player mode fades into the background relatively quickly.

I enjoyed Dark Rift quite a bit during my time evaluating it, and I will probably rent it again on occasion when my friends come over. I would guess that fighting fans will like Dark Rift as well -- they may even consider purchasing it. Dark Rift is a good game, but not good enough to justify purchasing without renting it first.