Creed Arena Review: Another Perspective
Creed Arena is an Xbox Live Indie Game, developed by Safari games and released at the beginning of this year. Creed Arena pits you, the player, in Gladiatorial showdowns in a futuristic tournament, and politely asks you to destroy your enemies with a variety of weapons across numerous game types.
Creed Arena can either be played with a top-down view or an over-the-shoulder view. I found the top-down view to be incredibly difficult to control, so I always used the over-the-shoulder, which played much more like a standard shooter. In terms of shooter mechanics, this is very basic, as I suppose you would expect from an Indie release. You run and you gun, and frequently jump around. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with stripping a genre down to its core features, and it does mean that you can dive straight in and just have plain old fun rather than worrying about complex gameplay features.
The aim in Creed Arena is to please the crowd. As you kill, and particularly if you kill in impressive ways, you improve the number of fans you have in the audience. The fans are fickle however, and you’ll lose some if you die. It’s a neat mechanic, although all it really is is a basic score system with a different name. “Crowd Rage” ties into this mechanic, though, and if you pull off a number of spectacular moves you’ll enter this mode, and gain increased health, damage and speed for a short duration. A very cool feature.
In terms of gameplay variety, there is a rather limited number of guns and game types. Again, though, this is stripping the genre down to its basic components to deliver pure fun. Guns include machine guns, plasma cannons, lightning guns and, my particular favourite, the rocket launcher. Game types include Collect the Kegs (capture the flag), Survival modes, First to 20 Kills, First to 5000 Fans, etc. A pretty standard selection, but most offer something a little different from the others.
The game is split into Solo Tournament, Co-Op Tournament and Multiplayer. In Solo Tournament, you must fight a number of different challenges to become the most loved combatant. There is a story about using this system to gain support to overthrow an oppressive regime, but this really isn’t explored. Co-Op Tournament sees you run through the Tournament with a friend, and Multiplayer is where the fun is really at. For an Indie game, there are a good number of players online to match up against, and the games are fast, furious and fun. Everything is well balanced and, like I keep reiterating, fun.
Graphically, Creed Arena is pretty good, especially for a game developed by two guys (really). The style is simple, but very effective. Models and textures are neat if not ambitious, and the game runs very well in high resolution. The lighting is exceptional for such a small production, and it ties everything together into a very attractive package. The sound is very impressive as well, especially the music which, although a little repetitive, is just awesome. Gun sounds, crowd cheering and enemies dying all sound spot on, and help immersion.
As fun as Creed Arena is, something about it just doesn’t sit quite right with me. As an Indie game, surely it should do something that a mainstream game couldn’t get away with; some kind of unusual game mechanic, or artistic style, or way-out-there story. Instead, Creed Arena offers, essentially, a slightly stripped down version of Unreal Tournament. Don’t get me wrong, Creed Arena is entertaining, and an incredible achievement for the two guys who made it, but surely an independent project needs to do something different to grab the attention of mainstream audiences, rather than just stripping down and repeating what has already been done?
Overall, Creed Arena is very fun, and definitely worth the miniscule 400MSP to purchase. Unfortunately, every aspect of it has been done before in big-name games such as Unreal Tournament and Quake 3: Arena, so it’s difficult to recommend when these games are available for the PC for just as cheap, and still have multiplayer communities. Even Unreal Tournament 3 is available for Xbox 360 heavily discounted. However, if you’re looking for a distraction for a few hours, and a game to play with a few friends for a laugh, you can do a lot worse than Creed Arena.
[starreview tpl=16]
(Be sure to check out Starfox 118′s great review for another take on the game at http://thegamershub.co.uk/2010/02/creed-arena-review/)
Short URL: http://thegamershub.net/?p=3650
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