Guilt Battle Arena, is a couch co-op battle game for up to 4 players.
Timothee Verrouil, the one man development team behind the developer known as Invincible Cat, has managed to create a fun co-op party game experience, from concept to reality.
Though the game was released originally in February on the Xbox One market place, there was a recent update that added several new features to the game, including 6 new game modes.
The game is simple to play, you fight against 3 other enemies, firing your one bullet to stun, or damage your rivals. You must pick up your bullet after firing it each time, whether it hits your target or misses completely, this may seem annoying but during the flow of battle it quickly becomes natural and automatic to you. However if any player runs out of hits (you get 3 hearts), you die, but you come back as a ghost and can continue to annoy your opponents by stealing their bullets, though all they need to do is pass through you to redeem their bullet but they in turn could be killed easily by other players or by the environment. Guilt Battle Arena is a 4 – player game, if you have no friends or lack the controllers to have more than 2 players, you can play with up to 3 bots, with options to change their difficulty, ranging from easy to insane.
There are 79 characters to choose from (some are just costume variants) in 13 game type, yes THIRTEEN, that wasn't a typo! which include capture the flag, hot potato, and last man standing. Each match can be customised with 10 game play modifiers, which also stack with each other where you can have low gravity or invisible players with the environment trying to kill you as well such as cannons that fire on you if you don't have flags at the end of Capture the Flag mode. So many options to keep the game play from getting boring!
All of the above is available in the custom game or battle mode options where you can vote for the next game type and any mods (custom obviously allows you to set these yourself). #
However Cup allows you to fight in a series of ten matches where each set of modifiers are already set to fight with and you have to win as many matches as possible to get the Gold cup, there are a total of 7 cups to win in this mode.
The other main mode is Horde, where you can fight endless swarms of enemies, this gets hard really fast, you need to dodge projectiles, charging enemies with swords, the idea is to kill as many as you can so dodging them is not enough, for maximum points you need to kill em’ all!
Sometimes the game play is a bit repetitive but as mentioned above being able to modify elements helps keep it fresh.
The game has good music, very pleasing to listen to unlike some games with annoying repetitive soundtracks, you’ll find yourself just playing so you can listen to the music.
Verdict
Guilt Battle Arena didn't grab my attention at first, I felt a little bored but I persevered for the sake of the review, knowing I have a job to do! Don’t get me wrong it’s not because it’s a bad game, far from it, I just don’t like this kind of game normally (pretty much anything trying to be smash bros that isn't smash bros lol) .
However the game grew on me, it became fun the more that I played it, I felt like I was getting somewhere when I unlocked my first character. But the lack of online multiplayer is disappointing but I understand it is meant to be a couch co – op game, if you lack somebody to play with it would be a nice feature to be able to play online as well, at least you can play with bots so it’s not all bad.
All in all, I think it’s worth a look, I recommend at least playing it for about an hour, the game is fun once you get used to the mechanics and you will keep coming back for more. I love the music, and after playing more I love the game!
Developer: Invincible Cat Publisher: ForwardXP Release Date: February 14th 2018 Price: £7.69 File Size: 319.12 MB Xbox One copy provided for review purposes
Available on: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Steam, Xbox One and Game Jolt