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Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Episode One, The Reviewening |
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Written by Derek "Dewar" Harwell
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Thursday, 22 May 2008 23:54 |
Ever since I first saw a working copy of Penny Arcade Adventures at Penny Arcade Expo last year, I’ve been eagerly awaiting its release. The setting really resonated with me, and the style of the animation and writing appeared to match the comic well. Unfortunately, as it was still early in the development cycle so we were only shown the demonstration while an employee played and I didn’t have the opportunity to mess with much besides the character creator. When it finally hit Xbox Live, I threw down my twenty dollars as soon as I got a chance to sit down with at console.
There’s a demo available, so I’ll skip the basic description of the game. Sufficed to say it’s a role playing game with turn based combat where the main character, named after the signed in player’s Gamertag, teams up with Gabe and Tycho to solve the mystery of the giant fruit fucker. It’s about what you’d expect out of a Penny Arcade game, with violence, swearing, and stupidity in all the right proportions.
The combat mechanics are pretty solid. If anything, they suffer from simplicity, as there aren’t all that many choices of actions for each of your characters. It’s spiced up a bit by the Paper Mario style active defense system and the mini-games involved in each character’s special attacks. The main downside is the item system, and it fails mainly because items are so common, making any sort of item management or frugality pointless. The game does a good job of teaching the mechanics step by step, but the transition from training fights to actual fighting is a bit rough, as the damage ramps up from around six per hit to as high as thirty per hit.
Though the story is lacking, the actual dialog and writing are top notch. All of the characters act as you’d expect even though the game is separated from the comic by almost a century. The cast of secondary characters keep the game fresh, and the main characters choices in responses are varied and interesting. There are many laugh out loud moments, mostly involving references to the comics, so only veterans of the Penny Arcade website will understand a lot of the jokes.
Overall, what the game lacks in depth it makes up for in the wonderful characters and pure hilarity. If the advertised eight to ten hours of gameplay is true, it’s well worth the twenty dollars as long as you’re a fan of the style of humor in the comic strips. And after all, if you aren’t a fan of the strips, why would you even bother to read this review?
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Last Updated ( Monday, 26 May 2008 15:48 )
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