Dec 10, 2007

Here’s something you don’t see every day: an original game for Xbox Live Arcade. Not that there’s anything wrong with ports of classics or movie spin-offs; but the promise of an all-new experience sparks more of an interest than “Hey, let’s play this game that we’ve already played, like, 10 years ago.” That said, it was sort of a bummer when we loaded up Arkadian Warriors and found ourselves playing Champions of Norrath Lite - that game came out only 3 years ago; we haven't even had a chance to forget it, yet.

Like Champions, Arkadian Warriors is an action dungeon-crawling RPG with players running through floor after floor of generated monsters, collecting these items or killing that boss. The story isn’t deep and there’s not much to the gameplay besides hack-n-slash, but Arkadian Warriors ups the cute factor with a cartoon-y art style, and looks prettier by virtue of Xbox 360 graphics. The only major difference between Warriors and Champions that equals a plus in our book is that your character can morph into a ginormous mythical beast (e.g. Griffon, Phoenix) when the yellow Alter Ego bar is full and wreak some serious havoc for about 10 seconds. The co-op mode is about as fun as Champions (if stripped from 4 players to 2), and all three classes of character (warrior, archer, sorceress) handle decently.