Thought I'd update this one more time incase my initial negative thoughts persuaded people into not trying it at all. This game is a lot harder than the first. It seems you need to play both your character as well as positioning your teammate with the right thumb stick during volleyball. I'm not sure if this horrible teammate AI was an accident or it was part of the challenge they added to the game, but it certainly makes things harder.

What this ends up doing, until you get a hang of the game (I still haven't) you will lose more then you win. Your teammate will not like you very much for this, causing them to never really send you gifts or worse they regift everything you send them back to you. Once you lose the friendship w/ your teammate you might as well find a new one but sometimes a good gift can start things back up again. Also, any revealing suits seem to drop the friendship to zero :P

I think the new challenge might make this game last longer than the first though. It's no longer the easy/chill game to play that the first was but a challenge isn't always bad either.

The new mini games are certainly not meant to hold your interest. The game is still all about volleyball, but every once in a while a wave race or other random stuff is ok...

The graphics in the game really aren't bad at all, but you are so far away from the volleyball action you can't really see anything "next gen" about it. I will say the lighting looks pretty nice, and the suits with drapery look really sweet in motion. Also the hair isn't half as annoying as it was in DOA4 imo.

One more thing; in other reviews I saw people mention that suites were being reused from the original. Errr, nope. There might be a few basic styles that came across to the 360 but the vast majority is definitely new.

If you liked the first, I say try it out. Just expect to get whooped for a longggg time before you get the hang of it.

Thanks for the impressions. I'm so disappointed that it's not 60fps.