SouthPeak open event - X-Blades & Roogoo

SouthPeak interactive (or SouthPeak Games) is a relatively new company seen to the public eye, they had appeared to come out of nowhere with an ambitious and innovative RPG called Two Worlds, you may have heard of it, a relatively popular title in mid to mid-eastern Europe but well known to the average gamer also. I think SouthPeak jumped upon the media bandwagon with Two Worlds as before this title was even released SouthPeak games had a few other published games under their belt. Games which take the name of Scurge: Hive; a fantasy action adventure for Game Boy Advance & Nintendo DS, Juka and the Monophonic Menace; another fantasy based game but on the Game Boy advance and Monster Madness Battle of Suburbia; which was released for both Xbox 360 and PC. It only seems that in the last two years though that SouthPeak have really got the ball rolling with the amount of published titles it has released and announced, all of which we look forward to seeing more about.

One way of opening up to the public is buy inviting willing journalists to come along and look at their working in progress games, sometimes called an "open event". Very recently msxbox-world was very kindly offered to come along to this event and receive an insight to just a few of these yet to be, or very recently, released titles. There were a good mixture to be sought out, a mixture of genres and a mixture of platform types, it really seems SouthPeak games are spreading their wings with all the platforms here; it's good to see a publisher without any favoritism in mind for once.

The titles presented at the day were; Ninja Town (DS), X-Blades (Xbox 360, PC, TBC), Monster Madness: Grave Danger (PS3), Roogoo (PC, Xbox 360 LIVE arcade) and an unannounced game we're not allowed to talk about just yet. I was very much interested in playing on and talking about all of them, but of course on the day I was only focusing on what was to be found on Xbox 360.

Roogoo

I would vote this game as the game with the most unusual name, but as I was always taught, never judge a book by its cover, or in this case, its title. This title is a new type of inventive puzzle game, a smaller title, but one which could and should make a big name for itself. I'll be honest with you, this is a game which upon first sight you may ignore because of its very 'babyish' theme and disguise to it. I had later found out that this wasn't a game which was just for the younger audiences; it is a game for anyone and everyone.

The game takes a little inspiration from the old children's blocks game, you know the ones, where you had many different multi-coloured and shaped blocks and had to fit them in the holey cube. It takes this idea, but puts it in a fictional game world called "roo" and has many disks on top of each other. These disks are the ones with holes in matching the colours and shapes, so these act as the cube. Then the shapes fall from the sky, which act as meteors, and you have to turn the disks in time for the shapes to hit them, sound simple, yea? It gets harder, and a lot smarter. You'll be facing some enemies also, "meemoos" in fact. These can block some of the meteor holes and you must get rid of these by selecting the relevant disk and quick dropping it with the meteors which temporarily gets rid of them. There will also be other puzzle mechanics which are added to the equation as the game progresses, like multiple meteors being dropped at the same time, just to make it that little bit harder to get a hang of.

From the looks of things, this is an arcade game which is taking the usual arcade modes but also taking them a step further. With previous reviews and previews I have done upon Xbox LIVE arcade games I normally state whether the game is worth the 400-800 points it costs. With the amount of content there is to offer here, this game definitely offers as much as you're going to get for almost any Xbox LIVE arcade game currently out there, it's just a question of if you like puzzles. With Roogoo you'll be experiencing your standard single player which works through a loosely tied campaign, your local multiplayer with competitive and co-op play, and your Xbox LIVE multiplayer with head to head ranked and player matches. And of course the good old leaderboard for matching scores.

This isn't just an unusual puzzle game, it has an unusual back story as well, one of which apparently came in a dream. Basically the story goes, the planet of Roo is in danger and so is the Roogoo race. The "meemoo", who are converted Roogoo and evil arch nemesis out to get them, are trying to steal these magical meteors and use them for their own "life draining" cities, and your job is to get them back by using the disks to safely guide them to the ground and restore life to the planet Roo.

Roogoo is unique for its concept and back story, but it's also a unique and interesting package with its very colourful and contrasting art style and graphics. The game takes place in a number of settings, although the game follows the same gameplay idea of guiding meteors, it gives a different and refreshing visual experience every time.

This is a 3D game, but it's a simple, bold and colourful outset. The contrasts lay within the innocent bright Roogoo creatures and surroundings, and the evil dark Meemoo beings and themes. It all fits together very nicely. Roogoo can be bought for the PC or on Xbox LIVE arcade. It has been released for Xbox 360 on June the 4th 2008, and even more recently on PC on June the 12th.

X-Blades

X-Blades, developed by Topware Interactive, is a game inspired by a mixture of well known and recently released titles, two of these are Tomb Raider, for it archaeological female heroine , and Devil May Cry, for its fast paced combo related combat movements, and I definitely had seen some of those two titles in the game. This in no way suggests that this game is a "rip off" or a "copy" in any way, because as we all already know all games have specific inspirations somewhere within its development process, these were just two of which were mentioned at the time.

X-Blades also has an obvious inspiration of anime, one glimpse of some of the pictures can tell you this, there are definitely a few anime fans in the development team and it definitely takes the theme of one. What was interesting, or should I say, different about this game though was its contrast in visual theme, similar to Roogoo but went about in another way. The graphics engine takes a mixture of cel-shaded animation for the characters and gritty/realistic detail for its surroundings, and it seemed to work. This was the impression I had gotten from the mission I saw at least, but this may be because the game wasn't finished yet.

In this game the character you'll be playing as is Ayumi, she is your "stunningly seductive yet tenacious" anime heroine, and she'll be your extremely nimble, acrobatic adventuress's locating lost treasures in the land of the unknown, it's all awfully exciting stuff.

Running, jumping, hacking and slashing is the general gameplay configuration for this game. This is where you're going to see some of the similarities with such games as Devil May Cry, as you'll be pulling off combos and special attack abilities very often. Special attack abilities such as magic powers, these are assigned to your D-pad and are bought through the 'select' menu, it seems to be a lot more involved with magic attacks than it does with games such as Devil May Cry, which is good as it makes the action varied. You will be using your blades as your basic attack, your guns as your ranged secondary and your magic as your support and special. As playing the game, using a mixture of these did appear to be the fastest way of making a quick finish of the enemies, many of the enemies were only resilient to a certain attack also.

Although I was told there was inspiration brought behind the story and character/s of the game, there wasn't very much of that shown or apparent in the gameplay I was given a go of. So whether this game is very reliant on its fast paced action or it's just not been a priority of development just yet, I wasn't sure, I'll leave story and character details for a later date. It was also mentioned that the game is aimed at a "wide" audience level, so the hack and slash legends out there will find this game enticing and so will the casual Xbox 360 players. The combos seemed optional, I wasn't forced to use these but I expect on a higher difficulty setting I would be forced to use a combination of different attacks. Remember, this is still a working title, so what I had played may change completely in the full game, although I imagine the whole close combat and magic combination to stay the same.

What I had seen from X-Blades potentially could be very promising, I could only imagine how the story could be as this wasn't quite ready yet, but the taster session of the gameplay did give some indication of what kind of audience this game will be aimed at and what we might expect in some of the missions.

X-Blades will be released on Xbox 360 and PC, the release date is yet to be announced.

Posted By: Lee Burton

Date: 2008-06-18