Like a doting parent on Christmas morning, we can’t help but make sure the two newest game systems receive equal treatment. Just as we wrote at length about the launch of PlayStation 4 hardware and software, so have we babbled about Xbox One: the system, the zombie game, and the racing game. Then we did a side-by-side comparison of the two consoles.

Of course, no next-gen launch is complete without a rundown of exclusive downloadable fare—who goes to stores anymore, anyway?—which brings us to the biggest Xbox Live-only games at launch. Xbox One has ushered in the $20 starting point for downloadable games (with one kinda-free-to-play exception), but from the look of these three games, that $5 hike might have come a little too soon.

Killer Instinct

The original Killer Instinct managed to somehow stand out from the slew of also-ran Western fighting games that rose and quickly fell during the mid-’90s. Amidst cartoony, violent, and weird experiments like Primal Rage, Clayfighter, Eternal Champions, and Mace: The Dark Age, Killer Instinct was a rare glimmer of so-called maturity from Nintendo, complete with fancy-for-the-time pre-rendered 3D characters.

It was the combos: so many 15-hit explosions dropped arcadegoers’ jaws to the ground while an amped-up announcer growled about “cah-cah-cah-combo breakers.” But that flash also hurt the game’s balance: the original arcade edition had glitches that, among other issues, allowed TJ Combo to easily win by way of infinite combo.

After a decade of corporate mergers, Killer Instinct is now a nostalgic ball of dynamite for Microsoft to dust off in the hopes of attracting old fans to a new console. If they do come flocking, they’ll delight in the old KI guard remaining mostly firm—what little of it there is on offer, anyway.

In this download-only game, only five KI veterans return, along with a single newcomer, and two more fighters have been promised in the future. In a cost-to-content sense, that might suffice; $20 is the starting price for the eight-fighter pack, compared to about two-dozen fighters in a standard $60 game, right? (There’s also a $40 version with more costumes and an emulated version of the 1995 arcade classic.)

The trouble is, KI doesn’t offer six particularly distinctive fighters at the moment. New character Sadira drives that point home. She comes equipped with hand-mounted blades and sticky spiderman webs, and she brings a few new aerial attacks to the series; hop in the air, then pull yourself towards your target with some sticky blades to slice and open combos. In practice, though, she’s more useful as an on-the-ground hybrid of Thunder’s brutal, spinning attacks and Orchid’s super-quick kicks.

But Thunder and Orchid don’t differ from each other, either, in terms of speed, power, and how they link “quick” and “fierce” moves to combo-smack the heck out of opponents. Most of the other characters (including low-floor sweeper Sabrewulf) also lack such fight-changing distinctions, and the omission of sluggers like Fulgore or TJ Combo is deeply felt. The only real distinct fighters are Jago—the series’ Ken/Ryu clone who can create space by way of fireball attacks—and ice-alien Glacius, who owns the entire screen with Dhalsim-like extendo-kicks and other warping moves.

New developers Double Helix certainly can’t be faulted for their efforts. The small roster is at least tuned for high-octane fighting at all times, which feels decidedly KI-like. The online battles have thus far been lag-free (at least in the pre-release period), and the fights are full of sharp character designs and screen-filling particle effects at a consistent 60 frames-per-second.

To their credit, the developers also worked out some longtime kinks in the series. You’ll be more likely to break combos this time around, reducing the number of buttons required to stop a seasoned expert. Also, a new “instinct” meter fills when you pull off things like combo breakers. Trigger it, and you get 15 seconds to regenerate health and reset your combo meter, which can make for a nice turnaround for newbies.

While I can’t speak for expert-level play (I don’t own an arcade stick and I rarely worry about things like special-move animation resets) I will say I felt comfortable with the special move systems and figuring out how to pull off combos, especially thanks to a robust “dojo” training mode, which also comes in the game’s free version.

But don’t let that free version (which allows for free access to a rotating, single combatant), trick you into expecting a tourney-worthy brawler. This is a fun bit of sexy, nostalgic bombast at a reasonable price, but Double Helix has largely failed to create the balanced, rounded-out roster needed to sustain a good fighting game (though upcoming combatants Spinal and Fulgore may help on this score).

Verdict: Definitely enjoy the free trial access to a single fighter, but wait to spend cash if the nostalgia strings don’t tug.

Crimson Dragon

Riding a dragon through giant fantasy worlds while shooting fireballs, lightning bolts, and other elemental attacks at giant, airborne creatures. How can anybody screw up such an obviously winning concept, especially when the design team in question is famous for delivering that exact formula in the classic ’90s series Panzer Dragoon?

Leave it to Crimson Dragon to answer that question. Between slippery controls, sloppy looks, meager content, and a forgettable plot made worse by its delivery, this Xbox One launch exclusive does everything it can to drag the next generation of consoles backwards by at least a decade.

The game sees you trying to colonize alien planets while wiping out creatures who’ve caught a virus known as Crimsonscale—an obvious allegory for Christopher Columbus and co. wreaking smallpox on Native Americans, but replace the Santa Maria with a dragon. The plot, which at least had some hope of elevating Crimson Dragon beyond its lousy gameplay, is delivered in walls of uninspired, confusing text, spoken aloud by characters who have neither animation nor anything resembling personalities.

What remains, then, is an arcade shooter, broken into a series of brief, on-rails flying missions, in which you pilot your dragon with one joystick and your weapon’s aim with the other. Both parts move sluggishly and ineffectually, and both have further issues. You dragon is confined to only a small portion of the screen, for instance, and dodging enemy attacks is as simple as tapping a bumper.

You don’t really need to pilot your dragon, up until the moment a mission has a “dodge random structures” passage, and your pre-defined flight path makes it hard to gauge where you need to fly. Aiming, meanwhile, requires dealing with your pre-defined camera swooping around for no good reason, not to mention your giant on-screen dragon often blocking your view at the worst times.

You receive a “wingman” helper pretty quickly in the game, and it’s a bad sign that Crimson Dragon has to dole out this auto-locking helper to compensate for its aiming awkwardness. The game also includes some RPG-styled progression, including dragon upgrades and per-mission perks, but they’re mostly a lure to keep players grinding through older missions for higher scores (grind being the operative word here).

The beasts you blast, and the worlds you fly over, won’t seduce anybody with next-gen shimmer. Low-poly, blurry-texture, uninspired, buggy creatures fly over ugly worlds that explode in color, at least, but not in legitimate next-gen geometry. There’s a JRPG-worthy soundtrack behind all of this gunk, but Crimson Dragoon doesn’t even have the courtesy to isolate that quality tuneage with a sound test mode.

In an early mission, as a lifeless soldier pleads for your help, she implores you by saying, “Look, I know you didn’t choose this life; none of us did.” Luckily, Xbox One buyers have a little more free will at their disposal than Crimson Dragoon‘s lowly protagonist.

Verdict: Avoid like the Crimsonscale plague.

Lococycle

For the past few years, Twisted Pixel Games has edged closer and closer to fulfilling its dream goal: becoming a film production company. You can see the studio’s passion for cinema in more recent titles like Comic Jumper and The Gunstringer, as those games are peppered with wacky, live-action scenes and clever writing that reflect a gonzo filmmaking sensibility, often resembling the work of fellow Austin, TX resident Robert Rodriguez.

Those two games prove Twisted Pixel’s priority shift in another, more unfortunate way, by being flat-out terrible to play: Comic Jumper‘s dismal repetition and Gunstringer‘s inability to redeem the original Kinect should’ve been the one-two punch to put this once-promising game studio out to pasture. Instead, Microsoft kept signing the studio’s checks, and their latest dismal release, Xbox One exclusive Lococycle, should be the third strike to Twisted Pixel’s proverbial at-bat. What a giant fall from grace for a studio behind the wonder of games like The Maw and ‘Splosion Man.

For starters, who thought turning the clock back to 1993 made sense for showing off Xbox One’s next-gen powers? Lococycle‘s obsession with dialogue and full-motion video borders on Sega CD-worthy, and it gives the devs more than enough time to wear out the wacky premise of a futuristic motorcycle turned rogue, driving across the country while dragging a Spanish-speaking mechanic on its chassis. That mechanic, incidentally, becomes the bike’s melee weapon against other villainous robotic vehicles. Occasionally, the game’s long stretches of goofiness reflect an Alamo Drafthouse-worthy level of camp and self-aware fun, but more often, they rely on worn-out action-movie references and the tiresome gag of the motorcycle not understanding Pablo’s cries in Spanish.

Yet all of that video and dialogue content seems intentional padding in light of Lococycle‘s ultra-thin gameplay, seemingly designed with Kinect in mind before being repurposed for Xbox One. As players drive along endless, on-rails highways, control is incredibly limited: tap left and right to dodge oncoming traffic; hold one button down to shoot machine guns at occasional foes; hold another button down to “turbo” past others. Two other buttons handle melee attacks against other vehicles, but combat comes down to slapping a single button over and over with an occasional reflexive block move tossed in for good measure.

Top that off with occasional quick-time event prompts, along with a few super-simple types of enemy encounters that loop over and over a la Comic Jumper, and you have an abomination that could one day prove infamous for how hilariously bad it turned out. You won’t have another chance to find another launch-window game this bad for years, and let’s hope future console producers keep it that way.

Verdict: Gaming anthropologists should buy it out of car-wreck curiosity. Everyone else should look elsewhere.

via: ArsTechnica