Enjoyment - 3/10
Difficulty - 4/10

Arcadegeddon is a hot mess. Even trying to spell its name is giving me a headache. The game is best described as an online rougelite shooter with light platforming elements. You gradually rank up your weapons and abilities as you complete levels and defeat bosses. There is a PvP element to the game that felt lacklustre. On release, the platinum was unobtainable which should give you an indication for what is to follow. Since first playing Arcadegeddon back in 2022, releasing as a PS+ essential game, the game has had a number of updates to improve the game and made getting some of the most annoying trophies achievable in single player which is welcomed.

Early in the game’s life, certain trophies could only be done in online co-op since not enough enemies would spawn in if you were playing in single player (notably Pyrotechnical to kill 15 enemies with a single fireball). This was hard to do legitimately since your teammates are more than likely killing the same enemies and not waiting for them to group up. While it is doable to do most of the stuff solo now, you still need to jump through a few hoops in order to get it done. The trophy list is littered with grindy trophies and some of them are very time consuming especially The Collector. After a number of hours of playing the game I was tired of the it. It did not help that some of the cooler outfits you could unlock in the game were gated off as microtransactions. Yikes…

There is a part of me that respects Arcadegeddon for its creative and daring direction. I was really interested in this game because it gave a lot of Jet Set Radio vibes from its aesthetic and punk attitude. It was a breath of fresh air and I did appreciate that. It is a very different game, for better and for worse. The missteps in microtransactions, poor launch, clunky gameplay, dwindling player base and bad trophy list makes my verdict very easy. Avoid this game.
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A third person shooter roguelite that so desperately wants to be Risk of Rain but falls short.

Arcadegeddon's honestly got some really great stuff going for it. The shooting feels good, the visuals are solid, and the customization is fun. But past the surface level shine, the game itself is lacking that certain something that makes a game like Risk of Rain 2 so engaging and addicting,

Arcadegeddon's basic structure is: fight through enemies in randomly generated stages, defeat 1 of 4 bosses in a random order, rinse and repeat. The biggest problem is that there are no significant differences between hour one of the game and hour 20 of the game so the monotony sets in fast. The upgrades you get during a run (called "hacks") are incremental changes to things like fire rate, run speed, accuracy, damage, etc. The percentage increases you get to those stats are so minuscule that even after an hour-long run, I truly could not tell if I was doing more damage to enemies or bosses. It doesn't help that enemies scale up with you so any minor changes you get to your stats are completely offset by the enemies you encounter. In contrast, an hour into a Risk of Rain run and you are flying around the map quadruple jumping, one-hitting enemies, and firing 100 rounds a second.

In terms of cross-run progression, you get tickets you can spend on cosmetics, character XP to level up your character and unlock skills, and weapon XP to level up your weapons as you use them. While a level 1 gun versus a level 5 gun is more noticeable difference than the hacks, it's not really fun or exciting. The magazine gets a bit larger and you do a bit more damage. That's cool, but I still never really felt like I was that much better than I was when I started the game... and that took a lot of the satisfaction out of playing.

The weapon variety in the game is quite good. There are various weapon types and elements. You can hold 3 weapons at once and guns are constantly dropping from enemies to encourage you to mix it up and try different combinations. But after a few hours of playing, I found a weapon combo I liked and mostly stuck with that the rest of the game unless challenges required I use something different.

As for story, you'll play through a pretty loose story which mainly consists of you accepting a series of challenges to accomplish during your runs. Those challenges, however, were never really that unique so you could accomplish almost all of them through just normal play.

As a multiplayer game, it's pretty fun. I played with 3 friends a bit toward the beginning, but the launch of the game was so riddled with bugs that most of my friends quickly bounced off. Determined to get the horrible Platinum, I stuck with it. The bugs eventually were fixed but the community that remained was depressingly small. Matchmaking never filled anymore so I mostly played solo or with one other friend.

Overall, the game was pretty fun and had some potential, but they really could take a page out of Risk of Rain 2's book to make the game just generally more fun and replayable.

+ Shooting feels solid
+ Good visual style
+ Great gun variety
+ Fun character customization options

- Lackluster progression that wasn't rewarding
- Runs barely change from minute-to-minute
- Launch was riddled with bugs
- Terrible trophy list that requires a brutally long grind

The core gameplay is pretty solid: the gunplay and movement set flows pretty well and it has an exciting variety of guns with different effects and playstyles.

However, the game is structured to be veeeery repetitive. It's a run-based game but you don't have enough options to make runs feel different, so it feels like you're playing the same thing over and over again. The bosses are awfully balanced for single-player mode, both competitive and co-op multiplayer are very tiresome, the game's """"""""""""""humor""""""""""""" is agressively cringy and the soundtrack is horrendously dated, filled with 2010 bargain Skrillex garbage.