Regardless of the score at the end of the review, King of the Arcade is an absolute feat of game development. We want to shake someone’s hand. This is quite the achievement.
King of the Arcade has no right to be this comprehensive. It’s a budget indie game from Super Villain Games, made by – we would assume – no more than a few people. With the resources they have, we can’t comprehend how they’ve done it, but they’ve made forty games for you to play in their entirety.
That’s not to say that the games are new or in any way innovative. These are all absolute copycats, and that’s entirely the point. King of the Arcade lets you wander the corridors of an 80’s arcade, playing any games you fancy. The enjoyment comes from spotting the game it’s copying and wringing any fun out of it.
We enjoyed playing a game of guess-the-reference. Do it yourself: stand in front of one of the arcade cabinets in King of the Arcade, look at the decal and name, and have a pop at what game it’s copying. What do you think Jump Pals will be? Top marks if you guessed Mario Bros, the original NES version. City Brawler? That’s Double Dragon. Sidewalk Fighter 2? Too easy: that’s Street Fighter II.
In its free-play mode, you can approach and play any game you like in King of the Arcade. It’s two floors and a basement of arcade machines, beckoning you to play whatever takes your fancy. Some of the cabinets offer two-player (a couple even offer four-player), which is no more than a pass-the-pad between you and one other player(s), while others offer leaderboards. These are entirely local, but it’s nice to have the option of beating your best scores. We’d have taken something a bit grander, beating the community’s scores or having leaderboards for all games, but we’ll take it.
They’re certainly not bad-looking games, considering the limitations. King of the Arcade pilfers from Unity libraries, you would guess, and makes fine use of simple polygonal shapes to create its worlds. But it’s not the graphics that are the problem: it’s the games. They’re so thin that opening a window would cause them to float away on the breeze.
They each find different ways to resist you playing for more than two minutes. Some of them find something decent and then fail to remix the offerings. These are the one-level ponies. Jump Pals manages to feel like a fine approximation to Mario Bros, but then pumps the same enemies and levels out of its pipes. Lady Buggin’ riffs on Frogger, but can’t find a way to spin the logs and lily-pads into different permutations.
Then there are the games with potential that get undone by poor decisions: some naff controls, perhaps. The Chase is a good example: it’s a top-down early-GTA clone, where you’re trying to evade cops. But those cops just glue themselves to your backside, chipping away at your health, and it ends up being no fun at all. Virtual Enforcement looks like it might capture the spirit of Die Hard Arcade, but mislays an indicator that a terrorist is about to shoot you. With that information, the wounds you receive would feel less arbitrary.
Next are the thuddingly simple. What’s the Jurassic Park quote?: they were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. Games are thrown in to hit a quota rather than offer anything of value. Tic Tac Toe gets added because of reasons, Button Masher offers an incredibly short-lived version of whack-a-mole, and Champion Punch tries to bring the arcade punching machine to the Xbox by offering one, single golf-swing mechanic.
Finally, you have the utterly, stupendously broken. These are games that are cosplaying as the originals without a notion of how or why they worked. Chatter Man is Pac-Man, but the maze has been replaced with open spaces that fundamentally misunderstand that a maze is needed to make it satisfying. Goal!! is Pong, but with the cunning ability to score from kick-off every time.
Like watching early 00’s parody movies like Scary Movie and Epic Movie, there’s a certain amount of joy in spotting the references. You can point and reminisce. Sifting through the games has a certain joy too, as you mentally sort the games into piles marked ‘passable’ and ‘awful’. If you’re like us, you’ll marvel at the sheer amount of work involved. The games may not be polished, but there’s so frigging many of them. Bravo, we guess.
There’s a Story Mode too, should you find yourself straying to it. But like the games in the arcade, it’s so gossamer thin that you’ll punch through it in minutes. A businessman is performing a hostile takeover of your arcade, and – as a one-time arcade hero – it’s down to you to defeat his goons in one-vs-one arcade battles. Only then will he back off. So, you’re fighting henchmen across ten or so games, in challenges that won’t really trouble you.
What it highlights is that King of the Arcade is missing a ‘why?’. Why are you returning to the games? Why should you persist through endlessly repeating levels? King of the Arcade can’t find a half-answer. Global leaderboards, hard-fought achievements or CPU rivals would have at least rewarded our persistence. But King of the Arcade is too busy creating game after game to care.
Still, forty games! We’re still shaking our heads at the dedication. Absolute madness.
You can buy King of the Arcade from the Xbox Store
