Riddled Corpses is the byproduct of yet another Groupees bundle, or so I think. I'm not entirely certain which one and I'm not going to look it up, but I want to stress that most card grind games I write short reviews on I didn't exactly buy them. I also want to mention the game doesn't let me take normal overlay screenshots, so this has less images than I'd like
Riddled Corpses is a zombie themed very arcade era twin stick shooter. You moved with one stick, shoot with the other. And you will move, and you will never stop shooting. That's almost the entire game right there, except you also get screen clearing bombs and a time freeze power that doesn't really work the way you'd expect. Seriously though, you move from zombies and you shoot zombies. Zombies primarily do touch damage, though higher power enemies spit gunk at you and the like.
Visually, Riddled Corpses is a pretty simple and clean looking pixel game. It does have some sort of dynamic lighting going on, which looks pretty cool sometimes and at other times seems to blotch out random parts of the screen. The pixel artwork is good, solid work with lots of variety and the animations are simple but satisfying. Admittedly the game isn't exactly a joy in motion, but it's a twin stick game where you shoot zombies and that doesn't really require or benefit from insane graphical fidelity. Visibility is crucial and that is a problem we'll come back to.
The audio is good. There is no speech or voice acting that I found in an hour of playing it, but the music is decent and the sound effects are mostly good. I do find the zombies seem a little ... Less than invested, we'll say, in being shot but you kill a ton of them so it's probably for the best.
In fact, the game is largely pretty good, except for two glaring issues. The first one, which I mentioned above, is that visibility was not precisely the cornerstone of the UI's development, meaning there's a ton of clutter on the screen and things will happily hang out under there. This is primarily an issue of difficulty, but it feels unfair that you can't see something because it is hanging out under the player 2 press start flashing nonsense.
The game's other big issue may or may not offend. In the first playthrough I was rather bemused - I lasted a couple minutes, but it seemed like absolutely everything was taking ages to go down. Were cars destructible terrain? Am I supposed to do a move and shoot phase on the mini-boss? Would I always have the identical same weapon? As it turns out, the game drops "gold" which can then be used to upgrade your character, buy other characters and the like. The grinding isn't super horrific, but it took me a couple attempts on the game's first level to get to the second level, and that level's required DPS was once again well above what my leveled weapon was pointing out. Basically, a big part of the game is being an extremely stripped down ARPG. Get loot, upgrade your mang, shoot many zombies until your current level isn't enough to push you forward.
Obviously play skill is important, but I honestly don't think you can DPS some of the later waves even in the first level without a decent chunk of upgrade. So whether or not you like grinding in your pick up and play game, well, that's on you.
There's something odd about the controls. I'm not entirely certain if it has something to do with the xbox one's deadzones or the game, but it acts really odd at times. You find yourself pressing hard left on the stick but firing sort of on a diagonal. I honestly couldn't quite figure it out, but it wasn't quite as responsive as I'd like.
Anyway, general conclusion is I'd give the game a pass, but if you like grinding or really want to play a decent twin stick, it is decent. But it is also super grindy which for me takes away from the appeal of the game. More than anything, though, it is how weird the controls end up feeling - like I said, that could very well be the xbox one controller not quite working right, but the deadzoning gets really obnoxious and kinda cut enjoyment of the game.
The game definitely feels some influence from those games, don't get me wrong, but it feels like a big fat mixing pot of platformers of all kinds stewed together with that slightly jank oddness that is indie development. It is what you expect, on the most part, with a little bit of what you don't expect. For another thing, because I implied there was more than one, it's actually a pretty solid little title that I found way more enjoyable than I was expecting.
