Arkadian Warriors is one of those titles that harkens back to the old hack and slash role play games, such as Diablo. This is a basic dungeon crawler where you will talk to a person in town and he will tell you about the current plight that the town is facing and will ask for your assistance. After you accept the quest you will enter a portal where a randomly generated dungeon will meet you and it is your job to clear out the dungeon, including a boss battle at the end. Throughout the game you will be gaining levels and in turn either gaining new powers or strengthening existing ones. The storyline within Arkadian Warriors seems to be rather basic, however, it works for this particular game and if you are a fan of these types of games you should have a lot of fun with it. You basically have to save the princess Artemis and the land of Arkadia from the clutches of the evil Gorgon.

Going through the game you have a choice to pick one of three different character classes. You can either choose to be a Solider, Archer, or Sorceress. Which character you decide to play will be dependent on your style. You can go through the game as a soldier and use weapons like a sword to slash your way through the wave of enemies that will be thrown at you. This is good if you are the type who likes in your face combat. The next class is the Archer where you can keep your distance from enemies however still attack them with your bow and arrow or whatever weapon you choose to equip. The sorceress class will have you levitating off the ground and gliding around shooting various magic at your enemies. Like the Archer class this allows you to keep your distance while fighting enemies. However, playing as the Soldier gives you a little bit more control as it relates to your accuracy when trying to attack an enemy. Especially when you get swarmed with a group of enemies at once it can become rather difficult to try and shoot/hit one while trying to dodge another. Fortunately, the designers realized this and by simply holding down the left trigger button you can lock on to the closest enemy and quickly take them out while trying to dodge everything else. After you go through some fights you will also fill this meter and be able to turn into your alter ego. Once this is filled you simply push the “y” button and your character will transform in a mythical creature and you will be capable of unleashing devastating attacks on your enemies for a limited amount of time. A good strategy I found was to try and do this on the bosses which makes the battle that much easier.

The controls for this game are fairly simplistic and should be easily picked up by anyone who enjoys this type of game. Even if you are a novice at these games you should be able to pick up the controls in no time. Holding down the right trigger button will bring up your menu system where you can equip weapons and armor, see what level your character is at, how many more enemies you have to go through to fulfill your quest and much more. Items like potion are hot keyed to the directional pad so you can have immediate access to them in battle. Simply push up on the directional pad and you will immediately use a potion. If you don’t feel like going through this quest alone Arkadian Warriors also features co-op play either locally or over Xbox Live. Choose your respective classes and help save the land of Arkadia with a friend

Overall if you are a fan of role playing games I definitely suggest trying out the demo and if you like it, then purchase the game. It is a pretty generic game so be sure to try out the demo first. The game can be a bit repetitive, but then again, a lot of these dungeon crawlers back in the day were repetitive as well. The game is 800 Microsoft points which is the equivalent of $10. It’s not a bad price considering what you are getting and I can definitely see this being the type of game where downloadable content can add new quests or things of that nature in the future.

Score: 6/10

Originally posted on Totally Gaming Network