Arcadegeddon Review (PS5) – This fast paced roguelike shooter by IllFonic is a co-op competitive title with a unique art style and some really incredible music.
The game is about Gilly’s arcade who is one of the last remaining arcades trying to survive the big nameless company that is trying to take over the city.
He boots up the one last remaining chance they have to fight back, and this actually has a virus in it. Your job is to cleanse it of the virus.
Arcadegeddon Review (PS5) – All The World’s An Arcade
Player One Ready?
The hub world allows you to explore the arcade and some locations around the building, as you continue to play through the main game. You will unlock more and more different customising stuff for your arcade.
The hub area also has multiple different gangs that will give you quests that give you tickets and gear.
Tickets are one of the main currencies in this game, this can be used to unlock customizations, such as head, body, legs and can even buy different skins for weapons.
Gilly also has his own store that sells skins and emotes, these can also be bought with tickets and he often seems to stock a couple of legendary skins.
Though these are pretty expensive, I find the game is very generous currently with the amount of tickets you can obtain.
There is also a real life money currency, though at the time of writing this, I do not know the cost of the currency so I have no way of knowing what everything costs.
But I found the amount of free stuff I can get is so much that you will not be forced to spend any extra money on this game unless you really enjoy it.
All The World’s An Arcade
During your first playthrough, it can feel quite challenging as you only start off with a starter pistol and a bat, but by that same token it is also worth it to explore each individual map, as you’ll be greatly rewarded for it and can soon be better equipped.
Sections of the map are handmade, but the map design is procedurally generated; this means you will not always get the same design each time.
Though right now the amount of different environments doesn’t seem that many, which is both good and bad. It means that if you are playing through it multiple times, you can often go and find chests you may have missed before.
These chests include hacks which buff your character for the run from things that increase damage to movement speed boosts. They also include coins and weapons.
Coins can be particularly helpful for those players who want a challenge, as you can use them to boost the difficulty in a level.
The amount of weapon variety in this game is quite good from shotguns to healing based weapons for co-op experiences. Though I will admit I have often stuck with the master blaster gun as I found it had a decent mid range and long range damage.
Once you have found a weapon in a chest, you get experience for killing enemies with the weapon. Gain enough experience and you’ll unlock the weapon to be used in your loadout, which you can set from the customise screen.
One of the things I love about this game, is that weapons rank up alongside you as you use them. It starts off as uncommon, but if you keep using the gun it will eventually become legendary.
I love this way to upgrade, because it doesn’t involve going round and getting a load of crafting items or doing strange challenges just to make a gun rarity go up.
Run The Gauntlet
The main aim for the game right now is the bosses, currently in the game there are 4 different bosses. Your goal is to be able to kill all 4 in one run, which sounds easier than it actually is.
During the stage you have a metre which as you gain points it will slowly increase, though can speed this up by keeping combos up.
I find that powersliding seems to give the biggest combo bonuses, so if you can get a few kills sliding then it helps out a lot.
Once you fill out the bar, it will spawn a boss node on the map. You then can ignore the current mission requirements and head off to go into the boss room.
Now what can make this challenging is, each stage the difficulty increases, so if you don’t take advantage of combos or take awhile to max out the boss metre it can make the encounter very tough.
It took me many runs before I finally got my clear of all 4 boss runs in a single go. The bosses don’t have that many different mechanics but the fact it’s a gauntlet is what makes it such a challenge because it can take ages to get to the last boss depending on how you play.
Also during the levels, the enemies are actually generated based on your playstyle, there is an AI director that will try to see how you are playing and try to put in enemies that will counter your playstyle.
The higher your difficulty level also the bigger and badder the enemies, such as the earth golems that can be frustrating. Though for me the biggest challenge was often the giant spiders as they seemed to have a crazy large health pool.
Bring Your Friends, It’s An Arcade! But It’s Still Small
If you are playing online with friends in co-op though, you can take small breaks with the battle room. This is a PvP area that has different types of PvP. I saw two modes during my playtime with the development team.
This was a mode that kind of reminded me of Rocket League, where there are 2 goals, and you are split into a team of 2 v 2. You have to grab the ball and throw it into the goal of the opposing team.
But you have a bat and a freezing gun to try and tackle the other team members. The other mode I got to try was a rocket based death match in which you just got to blow up the other players. You gain lots of coins based on how well you did in these matches.
There’s also plenty of arcade inspiration into the gameplay in that a leaderboard helps to keep you aware of your score, and how you’re doing compared to your friends based on daily or weekly scores, and even individual boss runs.
It’s further split between whether or not you completed these challenges alone or by yourself, as squads vs solo’s are tracked differently. What’s also quite fun is that if you’re sitting at the top of the leaderboard, your character gets a crown, which can be gold, silver, or bronze.
There’s a lot to love and have fun with in Arcadegeddon, and I truly enjoyed my time with it. The biggest problem it seems to have is that there isn’t enough of it to love.
With the inclusion of more maps and bosses, and just overall more content, Arcadegeddon is likely to feel like a much more fleshed out experience. Hopefully there’s more on the way soon.
Arcadegeddon is available on PC, PS5 and PS4.
Review code generously provided by the developer.