Review Score:

The Gladiator always fought valiantly in Italy’s greatest Colosseums, pitted against wild lions and tigers, slaves and fellow gladiators; all in a fight for their lives and their freedom. Imagine the roar from the crowd when you step through the gates and into the arena, the sweat on your brow under the hot Italian sun and your weapon gripped tightly in your hands. Creed Arena take this Gladiator arena combat and pulls it forward a couple of thousand years, now instead of swords and shields its assault rifles, rockets, lightning guns and pulse rifles.

Originally an entrant to 2009’s Dream Build Play competition on Xbox Live, Creed Arena has made its way onto the Community Games store on Xbox Live Marketplace. Now, with a lot of games on the Community Games section, there is a lot of rubbish to sift through to find that gem hidden away in the mine of Geometry Wars and R-Type clones, but Creed Arena is one of those gems. A gem so highly polished that, other than its 3DS Max visuals, one would be hard pressed to believe it actually was made by a couple of guys as a project for a competition, and more like something a big developer could have rolled out as a sideline game to another project (i.e. the Watchmen: the End is Nigh).

Awaiting entrance to the arena

For a community game it is rather lengthy in gameplay offering a single player tournament, an online multiplayer mode and on top of that a co-op tournament, which is the ideal way to play the game. The single player tournament, like the co-op, clocks in at around an hours worth of play if taken at a leisurely pace and contains around 30 matches with varying objectives, be it collect the kegs (a capture the flag game type), first to 5000 fans, first to 20 kills or survive ‘x’ number of waves. Multiplayer, which has already accumulated a reasonably healthy amount of players, granted its not as high as many xbox live arcade titles or fully fledged xbox 360 games,  it still has enough players to easily provide you with a match and it offers you a choice of the same game modes available though the offline tournament mode. Story wise all I could gather from the game is that you are fighting to become the number 1 in the gladiatorial arena, and from a hint at a much larger picture at the beginning, you are fighting for your freedom and to gain power to overthrow an oppressive regime; but maybe I’m just reading in too deep to what was skirted over at the start.

The actual gameplay  is what makes this game, as the story is rather non-essential and the visuals are impressive for a home project but look more like something from the later N64 Years/early original xbox games. The controls are very simple, the two sticks, one for aiming and strafing and one for turning and moving; and then the two triggers, the left trigger to jump and the right trigger to shoot, and finally the Right button to switch the view from top down to third person. Everything has been stripped down to the simplest core elements of any shooter, picking up weapons is as simple as walking over them, jump pads are activated by running over them and the Crowd Rage function is activated by winning over fans. Now what is Crowd Rage you ask? Crowd Rage comes from gaining fans, and gaining fans comes from killing combatants quickly or beating them down etc. Once you have reached 1000 fans Crowd Rage activates and you become particularly unstoppable for around 30 seconds, you become stronger, faster and your health refills.

CROWD RAGE!

Each viewpoint has its own advantages when playing the game too, the over the shoulder third-person view works much better at shooting over distances, greater accuracy and makes performing melees much easier; the top down view however excels at speeding up the pace of gameplay and adding a much harder challenge to the game, it also makes the game look even more impressive for a Community Developed game. However they both bring their own drawbacks too, top down only allows you to see and shoot so far and your accuracy is decreased quite significantly as the aiming doesn’t quite feel 360 degrees but more 16-32 directions and you can’t aim up or down whilst in this mode either; on the other hand in third-person over the shoulder view the gameplay slows down ever so slightly meaning having to compensate when you switch between views.

Overall this game is very well polished and is a highly accomplished game, with a bit more money and recourses it could easily become a full on Arcade title with a huge community; the guys at Safari Studios who developed the game deserve to have a hit with this game as it has to be one of the purest arena based combat games that has come along in a very long time and brings back memories of Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament. For such a cheap cost (400MSP) this game is definitely worth buying and playing, with near infinite replayability and ease of dip in dip out gameplay its a game that has rightfully stood out amongst the rubbish that so many indie developers seem to churn out and now deserves all the attention it should get.