Creed Arena

I loves me some platformers but sometimes a girl has to get a break from them.  Besides, I’m a tough sort of chick, the kind who likes big guns and lots of blood on screen.  What I needed was a shooter.  What I found was Creed Arena, a release from early 2010.

If you were ever into Quake or Unreal mods, you’ll feel at home with this one.  It’s a pretty basic deathmatch shooter with the usual assortment of guns.  You can alternate between a third-person perspective or a bird’s-eye-view of the action, each one with it’s pros and cons.  In the over-the-shoulder view you’re able to aim high and low, whereas in the top-down view you seem to move faster, you’re able to turn quicker, and you can melee easier.  Come to think of it, I’m not sure why anyone would bother with the third-person stuff at all.

The gimmick here is that you’re a futuristic gladiator who’s more concerned with winning over fans then racking up kills.  Every frag, melee, and “big hit” causes more fans to cheer you on.  The object of the game is to become the most popular gladiator by racking up a little over 100,000 fans.  This took me well under an hour to accomplish, at which point I hadn’t even beaten most of the challenges.  Sometimes you have to get kills, sometimes you have to fetch beer kegs, sometimes you have to be the first player to get X amount of fans.

I actually found the single player stuff enjoyable but not always for the right reasons.  The AI is super glitchy and often enemies would be seen running in place, like a video game version of the Trepak from the Nutcracker.  It was very amusing.  Other times, they would just get stuck in walls.

The default rifle, the lightning gun, and the plasma gun were all basically worthless, while the rockets and shotty were as satisfying and fun as they are in any other shooter.  Creed Arena really doesn’t seem to distinguish between a shot to the head or a shot to the foot so there’s really no point in zooming in to the slower third-person mode.  You get more fans by using melee beatdowns so I just stayed with the overhead shot and ran around smacking people to death.  I was actually curious if I could play through the entire game without ever firing a single bullet.  Not only did I do it, but it was actually easier that way.  One of the reasons is that if you get multiple kills in short order you enter “crowd rage” mode where suddenly you become faster, stronger, and able to jump higher.  In this mode, most opponent types die after one melee, while the amount of fans you win over gets higher and higher.  “Surely this feature won’t in any way cripple multiple” I thought.

I didn’t have a chance to play co-op, but shock of shocks, I was able to get paired up with a few random people for some online matchmaking.  Sadly, it was two little kids who sounded like they’re still waiting to see if they passed 2nd grade.  Oh well, an opponent is an opponent.  In our first match, I quickly took possession of a rocket launcher and proceeded to blow the brats back to the their momma’s womb.  There’s no ammo in Creed Arena so once you have a weapon, it’s yours until you die or pick something else up.  This was obviously a problem because nobody regardless of age or skill would have been able to deal with whoever was the first person with the good weapon.  Thankfully it was their problem and not mine.

Having won that match 5,000 fans to zero to zero, we decided to change things up with a shotgun deathmatch to 20.  And things started off well enough.  One of the kids even got the first kill in on me.  Then I discovered that each player only had one spawn point.  So I tracked one of the kids down, shot him, then camped at his base and spawn killed the little bastard for the rest of the game.   Hey, I never said I was a good sport.

So at the end of the day I had fun with Creed Arena but have difficulty recommending it.  It’s got fine 3-D graphics comparable to stuff from the Sega Dreamcast and a decent music track.  The sound effects were quite awful, and I could swear the plasma gun was saying “error” repeatedly.  The theme is fun and some of the maps are fairly enjoyable but the mechanics are heavily flawed and there is absolutely no balance whatsoever.  There’s really no reason for Creed Arena to exist.  If you’re the average Xbox 360 owner you already have at least a dozen shooters that are fully functional, have better online support, and have plenty of little second graders who are more then eager annoy you with constant “BOOM OH YEA HEADSHOT YA FUCKIN NEWBZ!”

Creed Arena was developed by reedake2

240 Microsoft Points won over the hearts of the crowd in the making of this review.