Arcadegeddon [online]
Does its best to push your buttons
Run through three colourful biomes gunning down robots and looting chests for weapons.
So, a game within a game? It’s like Inception, if Inception bore no resemblance whatsoever to the movie that actually got made. In this, your uncle owns an arcade, and he’s developed a new game to fight off the corporation trying to close him down. You need to play that game, and play it well. That’s all you need to know.
With up to three other people, you run through three colourful biomes, gunning down robots and looting chests for weapons and buffs. Yes, there are just three biomes – this is an early access title, with more areas planned for the future – but the devs aim to keep boredom at bay by tapping into the insatiable human thirst for competition.
Each level is split into two areas. The difficulty increases once you’ve cleared both, and you can choose to increase it an additional time at the halfway point if you have the coins for it. As the difficulty ticks up, the bots become tougher, but you also start to see different enemies, which require new tactics to take down effectively, being dropped in.
What really keeps us coming back is the urge to one-up those other players. The leaderboards
are currently limited to the top 20 players or teams, but a tally of your performance is given at the end of each level. Each player is judged on a variety of factors – kills, headshots, coins collected, revives, and so on – with one declared the winner before the game continues. Combined with the option of a PvP game at the halfway point, with the winner earning bonus loot, there’s a great balance of competition and co-operation.
At the time of writing, connecting with other players isn’t as smooth as it needs to be (something which should have been improved by the time you read this). Despite some other unwelcome quirks (tiny UI text and terrible dialogue) the core experience is good enough to struggle through. It’s already a solid co-op shooter, and we look forward to seeing what the developer has done by the time of final release.