Arkadian Warriors (Xbox 360)

When you enter the first dungeon for your first quest in the action role-playing game Arkadian Warriors, it doesn’t feel like too much of a stretch to believe you’re getting but a taste of where the combat might go as it’s given time to grow. You start off fighting things like boars and goblins, but even early on the dungeons can contain chimeras and harpies that seem like the more dangerous threats you can tackle better down the line as your equipment improves and you learn new abilities. After diving into a few more dungeons and completing a few more quests though, you’ll start to notice your newly learned abilities aren’t really that useful in combat and all too often you’re still facing the very same monsters from that first dungeon. Arkadian Warriors is not the kind of game that has much to introduce after the start, and rather quickly you notice the creative emptiness that plagues the action infects the rest of the experience as well.

 

Set in the land of Arkadia where creatures and gods of Greek myth exist, the player takes on the role of a Soldier, Archer, or Sorceress to help a town try and fight back against the evil Gorgon and her many loyal monsters. The goddess Artemis, despite being the one who introduces you to your task, also ends up just standing around town offering you a chance to retry previous dungeons after you have cleared them, and the people around town really aren’t characters much themselves. You learn the town has a mayor during the quest where his son has been kidnapped but you never meet the mayor and he’s never brought up again. You can only ever speak to one townsperson at a time and it’s the one currently offering the next quest, only Artemis and the merchant who buys and sells weapons and armor serving as exceptions. There really isn’t much of a plot or sense of space to latch onto as a result, even the dungeons just being places you teleport to where the interiors are randomly mapped out and often visually interchangeable due to their cave-like designs. You face a few boss monsters and some townspeople technically pop up again as they offer new quests down the line, but there are underwhelming payoffs like the blacksmith promising to eventually make you something good likely to only grant you their reward well after it’s weaker than what you’re using.

There are 19 quests in total in Arkadian Warriors and quests are mostly just going into steadily more dangerous dungeons to either defeat a certain amount of a specific monster, find a certain amount of specific items, or maybe talk to people trapped in that dungeon. Goals like killing a bunch of frenzied boars really don’t ask you to approach the dungeon differently save for not immediately taking the stairs to a lower level if you find them before the floor is cleared of anything that counts towards that objective, but there are at least plenty of monsters occupying every dungeon. Unfortunately, a lot of these monsters are going to be rehashed throughout almost the entire adventure, sometimes receiving nominal changes like a chimera who now can fire ice or flames in addition to its basic attacks. Some of the early monster types like golbins are phased out probably to put focus on things that look more fearsome, but generally the creatures of this top-down dungeon crawler can sometimes even feel interchangeable with each other and rarely do they pack unique tricks or gimmicks to make fighting them more exciting.

 

Part of the blame for the repetitive and bland combat certainly lies at the feet of the three playable characters. While you can play the game in two player offline or online and you will level up your hero naturally over time to learn new abilities, there’s not too much thought needed to deal with the usual rabble in a dungeon. The Soldier is meant to get in close to attack, the Archer utilizes long range shots, and the Sorceress launches magic from wands, but while they do have some weapon varieties like the Soldier being able to use a spear to stab further or an axe to hit things up close harder, the fact of the matter is most combat will involve you seeing a monster, running up to it, and beginning a tedious sequence of pressing the attack button, backing off a bit so their attack misses, and repeating it until the monster dies. There will usually be multiple monsters running at you at once to add some pressure, but lead them around a bit and you won’t have to break from the basic effectiveness of your standard attacks. Some weapons unfortunately have their attack speed slow this process more, mostly because when you try to launch a spell or fire an arrow, the attack won’t release immediately so adjusting your position to run away from an enemy a bit too early will make you miss.

 

When you start off there really is only the singular attack option to rely on meaning there’s no depth you’re missing out on when it comes to this basic and boring hit and run approach. However, you do gradually build up energy for transforming into your Alter Ego. Each class can turn into a large monster when their meter is full, the Soldier becoming a golden lion, the Archer a dragon, and the Sorceress a phoenix. Their main use is to not take much damage as you unleash heavy damage around you for a brief time before you shift back to normal, so while it is nice to have a way to break up huge enemy groups or whittle down boss monsters quickly, you’ve gone from slowly attacking and backing off to instead standing your ground and pressing attack repeatedly.

Each hero in Arkadian Warriors does learn a unique set of abilities, but it won’t surprise you to learn they don’t spice up combat very often. They rely on magic to cast, but at least one thing in the game’s favor is potion drops to refill health and magic are frequent enough that you don’t need the Sorceress to cast her healing magic repeatedly to stay healthy. You even get a few lives per dungeon run so a slip up won’t force you to lose progress, and rarely you can find potions to top off your Alter Ego meter to boot. Your abilities needing to pull on a limited amount of magic isn’t technically their limitation, it’s often instead something that connects rather closely back to that issue with aiming attacks. Your character specific skills often force a character to move a certain way or come to a stop to utilize them, and there’s a reason I emphasized the common attack approach is to strike and then briefly flee. Stay still for a bit, and the otherwise easily corralled enemies will likely surround you and, if your power did not wipe them out, you’ll be hit with a barrage of attacks after it is over. It can be nice to do something like unleash a blast of fire all around you when you’re dealing with tiny spiders and want to roast the nests that keep spawning them, but foes of substance are usually best whittled away gradually since taking risks and trying to make things interesting will likely come back to bite you.

 

Dungeons do have secret rooms that are often easy to find due to the on-screen mini-map and the fact they repeat the same ways of hiding them, and they usually just contain a bit of gold so they lose their thrill once you notice even the reason to explore a floor more closely is going to be repeated without much alteration all throughout the journey. Boss battles are one of the few places the game starts to muster some imagination as they can have varying phases and multiple attack types, and while they can definitely be slow because of your limited attack options, at least they feel properly difficult albeit not exactly entertaining. These bosses and the oddly cute designs for the characters seem like the only things that really stand out in an experience that feels rote almost from the get-go.

THE VERDICT: The early simplicity of Arkadian Warriors is unfortunately an omen rather than a starting point, this action RPG showing you almost everything it has to offer far too early and what it does withhold barely puts a dent in how you’ll approach the repetitive and unambitious dungeons. Your special abilities leave you far too vulnerable and most monsters are cut from the same cloth in terms of how they try to attack you, so you settle into a dull battle rhythm without much in the way of interesting rewards or disruptions to the norm to motivate continued trudging through this tiresome adventure.

 

And so, I give Arkadian Warriors for Xbox 360…

A TERRIBLE rating. It would be an insult to a merely monotonous dungeon crawler like Crimson Alliance to rate it on the same level as Arkadian Warriors, that game doing a better job mustering up variety and even giving you room to use your abilities some despite its own issues with simplicity and shallowness. Arkadian Warriors is that next step down, where you don’t even get to mix up your attacks much because what little help they grant is outweighed by the harm they can leave you open to. The focus on Greek myth feels empty when the game’s story is told so poorly, there even being points where quest givers talk like things are happening but the town never changes appearance and the danger in the dungeon is ramped up too slowly. The bosses at least force you out of your comfort zone a bit when they have attacks to punish the usual hit and run method, but Arkadian Warriors still will wear you down as dungeons feel thankless to explore and enemy battles blur together due to the small stable of monsters. Arkadian Warriors looked like it was starting off simply and would evolve into something more layered and challenging over time, so if it had merely delivered on that promise then it could start shaking off some of the monotony that makes your actions generally unrewarding. Foes get tougher, but if they had more varied attacks and your own abilities could be used more safely, then you could have proper skirmishes rather than running back and forth to gradually wear them down with basic strikes. The equipment system also runs out of new options quite a few quests before the end, so expanding it and more often distributing valuable treasures behind secrets or tough enemies could motivate doing more than trying to charge to quest objectives just to be done with it.

 

It would be easy to call Arkadian Warriors generic or a run-of-the-mill action RPG, but that feels like it is giving it too much credit. Maybe if you compare its first quest to another game in the genre’s first quest, but otherwise even other supposedly generic games can often muster up some variety so you don’t find yourself in the final dungeon still bonking beasts similar to those from the start with your most basic attack. In many of my reviews I try to lead in with some noteworthy feature or anecdote tied to the game in question, but I struggled to think of anything particularly interesting about Arkadian Warriors, even its Alter Ego forms underwhelming and not having much of an impact. If you want an absolute bare minimum functional action RPG, that’s what Arkadian Warriors offers, but there are so many other games out there that I implore you to value your time and seek them out since finding one better than this wouldn’t even be that difficult.