Dust Strikers brings a new flavour of Guilty Gear game to its new home on the Nintendo DS. All your favourite characters are there, busting their bewildering array of moves, and putting the beat down on all and sundry.

I must be honest, this game makes me feel pretty old – for a couple of reasons really. Firstly, the graphics so dang fast sometimes it’s hard for doddering old me to follow the action. And B: this is old skool beat’em up with 2D graphics reminiscent of the faithful old SNK Neo Geo arcade staple. On steroids.

The moves and animations are good and varied for each of the 20 characters - and very stylishly animated – but you only really notice that when you’re watching someone else play the game, because the action really is too fast to allow you much time to admire the pretty pictures.

Throw into the mix the added dimension of…well up and down, thanks to the innovative use of splitting the traditional side-on beat’em up into 4 stacked tiers that can be jumped up and down from, and more importantly attacked from…This makes for some really intense battles as you try and work out where the attacks are coming from so you can counter the blows and launch into a mad combo.

Did I mention that most of your battles aren’t one-on-one, but crazy four-way free-for-alls? It all adds up to something akin to the old cartoon brawls from Tom’n’Jerry where you can just about make out the odd flying fist or frying pan.

Oh, and to just stick a cherry on to all that icing that’s smothering the cake, they decided to bung a load of power-ups into the game – activate one and you could find yourself teleported all over the shop. Or given a massive boost. Either way, it’s a lot to get your head round.

As for the soundtrack, as you’d expect from a game of this ilk, is satisfyingly rocktastic and matches the pace of the game. Absolutely vital for a good beat’em’upping session I find.

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