Arcadegeddon, developed by Illfonic, is a 1 – 4 cooperative shooter with rogue-like features. You can team up with your friends or go at it solo and explore multiple biomes, play a variety of mini-games, find hidden chests, and defeat numerous enemy types and bosses. Arcadegeddon offers a mix of PvE and PVP modes that allow for all different speeds of play, and it is crossplay, so you can easily team up with friends on consoles to play together.

Players will need to battle their way through the multiple biomes the game has to offer, and with its rogue-like series of events, you never know what your next biome or challenges will be. As you progress through trying to survive for as long as you can, you find chests containing loot, guns that have a great variety, from standard machine guns and snipers to ridiculously fun ricocheting saw blades and explosive rounds, and money to buy upgrades from the vendor. You can also increase your difficulty level at the midway checkpoints, and passive stat boost cards, AKA, hacks, to aid you on your way to victory.

Weapons and hacks have rarities, from white being your common and weakest to gold being your legendary with powerful stats. The more you use weapons the more you gain experience with them, which allows you to unlock skins and choose them as your starting weapons to give you a stronger start to your runs.

In between missions, you will be hanging out at Gilly’s Arcade, the hub where you meet other NPCs to accept quests from and change your loadout and what style your character wears. With the quests, sadly, you can’t just take the MMO approach and grab them all to do at once. You will have to pick one and work on that before starting another quest. You can also check the global leaderboards, so you can compete with other players to earn the top spot in biomes and missions. It’s a nice little moral boost and a good throwback to going to an arcade seeing a score and thinking, “I can beat that.”

As you play a mission, you build up progress to boss fights by killing enemies and completing objectives; fighting the bosses is completely optional but might be worth it for the larger and greater rewards you get for defeating them. Keep in mind that much like a real arcade, you only have so many retry tokens which you can obtain as you play, or optionally, you can bribe to continue if you have enough money. Boss fights and normal progression can get a little difficult solo, so I recommend bringing friends for a more enjoyable time, but if you’re up for the challenge, solo runs might be for you.

With an already nice amount of biomes in the game, all of which are very well designed, vibrant, and fun to explore, they have already done such a great job of designing what they currently have. The objectives and enemies they have in the game can seem to be a little repetitive, but they do get switched up as you get further into the game, with the same enemy types throughout, but I would have liked to see enemies matching the biome you are currently exploring.

The bustling soundtrack, with a very upbeat dubstep/techno vibe going on the whole time you are in the game, really keeps that blood pumping and the ball rolling with a great music selection. Combined with the great action sounds of the weapons you have access to, and the variety of voice acting among the characters you meet in the arcade all give a really fun and exciting feel to the game.

The graphics are done well, with a futuristic setting, and featuring a lot of bright neon colour throughout. You are, after all, playing in a game world within the game, so it makes great use of designs that attract the eye, however, unlike other games, the brightness of the environments means stealth isn’t an option – just full-on action-packed shooting.

Arcadegeddon was first released last year on the Epic store and console Market Places. This is just a retouching of our initial review, as it is now also available on Steam. It has had a few small changes made, such as when Gilly breaks the fourth wall and talks about microtransactions, he will mention the Steam store to buy them.

Sadly, I did find it hard to find any multiplayer matches, and I’m not sure if the delay to release on Steam was a great idea, as it felt like there were no public games for low levels available at the time.

Written by: Shane Walsh