Terrifier: The ARTcade Game Review

Terrifier: The ARTcade Game tells the story of Art and his friends as they massacre their were through the city where Leone is looking to make a new horror movie. As Art or one of his cronies, you’ll fight through police, security personal and movie people in order to conquer the city.

Terrifier: The ARTcade Game is s standard affair when it comes to the beat’em up genre; move right, kill people and move on. All four characters have a normal and strong attack. They also can run, jump and dodge. As you kill enemies, a multi-level meter fills up allowing you to pull a special attack that (supposedly) deals extra damage (never saw it).

Once you’ve pummeled normal size enemies enough, they’ll be on their knees ready for you to execute them. A Y will float above their heads and once you press it near them, it’ll trigger a finisher. All characters have two finishers; for example Art will shoot a bullet through the end while the lady Art will huge a giant mallet to squash their head.

Once you’re done with the story mode, you can tackle Arcade, Boss Rush, Survival and Time Attack mode. All of which are pretty straight forward and self explanatory. Achievement wise, it’s pretty straight forward. With some will and patience, you can get the 1000Gs. And akin to classic arcade games, you can play up to four players. Considering that even solo at times it’s chaotic and overwhelming, four players is absolute hell.

The game looks fine; the visual style reminds me of Scott Pilgrim vs The World. The game features 7 different unique areas, with diverging paths (to encourage replays) from a people filled street to a circus to what looks like brain matter. Enemy design is decent enough; boss fights are fun, albeit very easy once you understand the patterns. The soundtrack is very mediocre and quite forgettable. Sounds like they didn’t know what kind of sound to give the game.

The game has nagging issues. The first being everytime you kill someone, blood splatters across the screen and makes the game slighly less visible; kill more than one enemy in rapid succession and you’ll struggle seeing the on-screen action leaving you open to damage. Enemies are incredibly cheap; if you’re surrounded by 3 enemies or more, they can bounce you around like a ball; yet you cannot juggle enemies. Also for some reason, once you’re knock down, you need to mash the A button to get up.

Terrifier: The ARTcade Game is one of the most unnecessary and piss poor uses of a license. It would’ve made more sense to play as one of the protagonists from the movies going up against Art’s cronies or even more like a Friday the 13th asymmetrical experience. The core gameplay is fine and plays well, but enemies are incredibly cheap. This can be worth a few hours of fun with friends on a cloudy Saturday afternoon, but there’s nothing that makes it stand out from other (and better) beat’em ups. Unless you need to collect everything Terrifier, given the amount of quality games of the same genre on Xbox Marketplace, this is an easy pass.