(PS4 60fps) Squareboy vs Bullies: Arena Edition - Arena Dojo 12/17/17
0Me not quite reaching the kill requirement to unlock the next arena in the "Arena Dojo," the first stage of Arena mode in "Squareboy vs Bullies: Arena Edition" on PS4.
This might be my favorite beat-em-up at the moment. Played co-op (local, aka "couch," only), anyway, it is just a heaping helpful of simple-seeming beat-em-up action in an adorable low-res style. What takes a little getting used to is the input system, but once you realize that you can sort of freestyle combo by leaving the directional pad in neutral, then hitting the attack button in a rhythm and sometimes nudging different directions while doing so to activate different moves, it just gets really fun. It's quite lengthy for a game of this type--took us maybe an hour to go through the main story mode, I think--and maybe a bit on the easy side until the last two encounters in the whole game, but still, jolly good fun. The streaky dash attack move is really zippy!
Since the arenas are really a survival-style affair, you can in theory replay them quite a bit for score; they do get pretty brutal in the end, and tend to go downhill quickly once there are enough baddies to kind of pin you down once they've knocked you for a loop.
I should mention that there are quite a few fairly obvious bugs in co-op mode, for instance if you buddy knocks a guy away while you were holding them, you're stuck in the holding animation for a little while, and once you finish an Arena stage in co-op, you return to the Arena selection screen, but in the next stage you start, it's in single-player mode rather than co-op. : P So obviously they didn't spend a whole lot of time testing or bug-fixing co-op mode; we didn't hit anything that prevented us from finishing, but definitely some annoyances that didn't need to be there. There's also a persistent problem, not sure if it's co-op-specific or not, where when a stage in the main mode advances to the next set of screens, you momentarily lose the ability to control your character, and have to kind of release the controls and try them again in order for them to begin working again.
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Streamed from a PS4 with an Elgato Game Capture HD60.