Arson & Plunder - Beat Em Up Basics

When I was young my dad owned an Amiga and with it, a good selection of games. One of those titles was Golden Axe and I played that over and over again, finishing it multiple times and beating Death Adder. Have I gone back to that game in many years? No. Why? I have to admit, I am worried that my memories of the game could be ruined on playing it again now and games like this only serve to add on to that train of thought.

Firstly the graphics are quite nice, crisp and colourful and pretty. The game does suffer from the occasional stiff animation though and the usual 'beat-em-up' cloned enemy issue. The music too is nice but it never really rises to be memorable in any way.

And that's where the big problem with this game is, it just doesn't try and be memorable at all. Each location is pretty but boring, each level throws enemy after enemy at you but rarely does it do anything to make you sit up and take notice. The characters attacks are decent enough but there just isn't enough of them to really work (A standing 2-chain hit, a charge hit, a jumping hit and three 'powers').

The levels themselves are also confusing messes too, instead of a straight forward level structure, each level is split into mini bite-sized ones for some reason and after each mini-bite sized portion of level, you begin the next with all health and magic restored and... this kind of makes the game a little too simple.

The characters too make a bit of a confusing mess also, the Orc (Plunder) happening to be so much better than the mage (Arson) with speedier attacks, speedier powers and better powers in general. There's so few situations where Arson happens to be a better character choice, something again not helped by the limited character move-lists.

And finally it commits a real beat-em-up sin. If you are to make a beat-em-up like this you NEED CO-OP MULTIPLAYER. Its that simple. Golden Axe thrived on its multiplayer, Castle Crashers is great for multiplayer groups too. By not adding any sort of co-op, the game is essentially 'burnt' before its even got out of the gate. As the game is, I would not recommend it at all.