couple
of minutes. One of the worst voices makes up a quarter of your party: Elco. The
poor guy sounds like he was a Russian who moved to America, mostly got rid of
that accent and then decided he wanted to sound like Antonio Banderas. It doesn't
help that his lines are some of the cheesiest in the game, with such gems as:
"Let's throw some lead in the air, see what falls over!"
Sudeki
is very linear in that you have to do things in the proper order, and the map
opens up as you go. It's not just the world that makes you feel like you're being
escorted through the game, but also how your characters develop. There are set
points in the storyline where your characters get armor upgrades and new special
attacks. These things just happen automatically and serve to enforce the feeling
that you're just following a predetermined path.
On this predetermined
path, you'll encounter enemies of various sizes and shapes, and this is where
the game is at its best. The combat is excellently done. Once you've assembled
your party of four, you have two mêlée fighters and two ranged attackers, one
of which you control at any given time. There are two buttons to cycle through
the characters, so the character you want is never more than two presses away.
Mêlée characters fight using a combo system. There are two attack buttons that
can be pressed in various orders and timings to create half a dozen or more different
strings. You'll develop your own favorites within an hour, and two of them will
most likely be the special combos A,A,X and X,X,A, to which you can append three
extra Xs or As to get six hit combos. The hits in combo sequences typically do
more damage than non-combo hits, and often the final hit of a string will be extra
strong.
To assist you with your timing, there's a little meter in the
bottom left corner of the screen. It has three slots, and when you hit X or A,
the first slot is filled with the corresponding letter. After a brief pause, the
next slot will light up, which is when you hit the next button. If you don't time
your presses right, or you press buttons in an order that doesn't yield a combo,
the meter dims and you have to start over. For those two special combos, you can
just mash X or A once you've completed the three-hit starter to get in those extra
blows. Finally, mêlée characters can defend, and there are very few attacks that
are unblockable.
In battle, the ranged attackers are always controlled
in first person, and while they don't play anything like a good FPS, they're easy
enough to use, although you'll almost certainly prefer to be in charge of your
mêlée attackers.
Each one of your party members also has Skill Strikes
(read: magic) and Spirit Strikes (read: supermoves), and the usual gamut of RPG
spells is present. One of Sudeki's gimmicks is its bullet-time driven menu system:
when you bring up the Item/Spirit Strike/Skill Strike/etc. menu, everything moves
very, very slowly rather than pausing the game outright. It doesn't really change
the way you handle your menu-surfing, but it can be useful to go into slow-motion
to give yourself time to see what your enemies are about to launch at whom.
Most battles in the game involve more than one character, and often your entire
party will be participating. You've always got control of one person while the
others are handled by the computer, which has a few different aggression settings.
This setup isn't too complicated, but it's still serviceable.
All of
these things lead to some great fights. The battle system is very well done, and
about the only things that could be done to improve it would be to A) move the
combo meter somewhere closer to the action (perhaps over your character's head)
so that you don't have to take your eyes off the fighting to make sure you're
timing button presses correctly and B) make the spells easier to aim. You eventually
get the hang of the timings, though, so it's not too big of an issue, but aiming
magic is often a frustrating ordeal. Enemies move slowly while you position and
aim yourself at normal speed, but the way the orange aiming pie rotates around
your character will sometimes cause you to miss your mark.
Battles aren't
quite random - you can't actually see enemies coming, but you can tell easily
where the fights are going to happen. Every time you get close to a clearing,
make sure you're ready for combat. This makes backtracking a bit boring, because
you already know when, where and what you're going to be up against.
There are puzzles in the game, sort of. Each character has a kind of special worldmap
move, be it wall-climbing, box-moving, item-finding or rocket-flying. It is always
painfully obvious what you need to do to proceed. Only one puzzle in the game
really seems to be a challenge, and that's much more on account of the terrible
fixed camera angle than any real difficulty.
One other thing that irked
me was that you really get nothing for beating the game: no ending movie, no showing
the effect your great victory should have on the world. All you're left with is
just another thirty-second shadow-puppet style presentation with a cheesy overdramatic
voiceover telling you to believe in yourself, which is then followed by rolling
credits.
And before I forget, I did encounter a glitch that, luckily,
only cost me half an hour of lost playtime. Elco, instead of falling into lava
and restarting on solid ground, kept walking along in thin air. He eventually
ran into an invisible wall and wouldn't respond to any controller input. He just
walked and walked and walked (Screenshot).
Overall:
6/10
It can either be taken as a good thing or a bad thing that the game
isn't long at all: it took me about twenty hours, factoring in all the times I
died on the last boss and had to reload. Since it's not an enormous commitment,
it may be worth looking into if you can't live without a new Xbox RPG until Molyneux's
Fable or BioWare's Jade Empire hit the shelves. Either way, it's
almost definitely a rental rather than a buy.
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