Trigger-heart Exelica is another little port to Xbox 360’s Live Arcade, they’re becoming to be a bit tiresome, not because it’s a port exactly, but because we can now know what to expect from them. Making a general overstatement here, the port versions of Xbox Live arcade games either don’t differ as much as they should compared to the originals, haven’t ported well, or are overpriced. Unfortunately it’s sometimes all three, and on this occasion, it is all three. Trigger-heart Exelica is a great example of the kind of Xbox Live arcade games you should avoid, that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad game, however, there are a lot better choices on the arcade list. Before we start with the constructive criticism, a brief overview of what the game is about is needed. Trigger-heart Exelica is a classic scrolling shooter ported over from the Dreamcast. You can choose from two ‘anthropomorphic’ (look that one up) fighters, which have minor differences, to go up against the various different enemy filled stages in the game. The mechanic is simple, holding the ‘A’ button to fire your default weapon while scrolling left and right using the analogue stick to dodge the enemy, every now and again dropping a bomb using the ‘RT’ button, which basically kills everything.

Gameplay:

Trigger-hearts (how I’ll call it for now on) skill base relies on quick thinking and quick movement as enemy shots race towards you, in this game the shots come a lot more often in bigger waves, at first glance it looks impossible to evade, but with some speedy weaving you might just pull it off. This doesn’t matter though, ‘what!?’ You say, ‘you don’t need any skill or effort to complete the game?’ That’s right, you can die as much as you like and still complete every stage in one sitting without restarting. This is because you have unlimited continues, your dying only resets the score counter. So completing the game is no challenge whatsoever, this will only prevent you from obtaining a few of the achievements and acquiring a decent leaderboard score. As mentioned before, there are two different types of attacks to use. The default laser attacks and the bomb attacks, which is more of a finishing move or a last stand move. Adding to this though, making this quite repetitive game slightly more interesting, is a ‘grapple’ or ‘grab’ ability. This can be used as a defensive and offensive weapon, you hold the ‘B’ button down it will attempt the grab the nearest enemy, the bigger the enemy the longer it takes, and then start swinging it round yourself acting as a temporary defense. You may also let go of ‘B’ which will then allow it to fly into a series of enemies doing some very serious damage. This attack becomes more useful within the later stages of the game, even know you don’t really need anything except the default attack, however, this ability is probably the most satisfying part of the game. Gameplay additions for Xbox live arcade you have the leaderboard, which seems to be a new standard for all Xbox live arcade games, and achievements, which seems to be a standard for all Xbox 360 games in general. Except for these little additions, nothing else has been added. The game is relatively short, if you play for a solid hour to an hour and a half, and you didn’t care about the continues, then you could fairly easily complete the game.

Graphics:

Now, I’ve played quite a few classic scrolling shooters and none of them really hurt my eyes as much as this one. This game is very bright and colourful, it’s full of bright solid colours, most of which are on the ships and lasers. This really isn’t good as these are the things which move around the screen very often, I couldn’t play for more than twenty minutes at a time without having to stop or pause the game. Although, I was playing this game on a standard definition TV, apparently the game has been enhanced to make the most of HD resolutions,so it could be very different. The rest of the game is to be expected, 3D birds eye view, except the short cuts in between stages, basic textures and surroundings. Each stage has a simple but distinctive theme to it.

Sound:

The sound track matches the pacing of the game fairly well, yet is typical arcade music though. However, the soundtrack has changed since the previous Dreamcast version, perhaps even updated. Sound effects include the basic explosions, all which sound the same, apart from when beating the boss at the end of a stage. There were some missing sound effects I felt though, in particular the yellow points you collect don’t have any sound when you pick them up, but the amount there are I suppose it can be acceptable. Other than that, there's nothing too spectacular, and nothing much to comment on.

Longevity:

As previously mentioned, this game is very short, one to two hours to complete maximum. If you care particularly about the achievements then for replayability, double that. There’s nothing more here but keeping your place on the leaderboard.

Overall:

To sum this up, this game is your standard scrolling shooter, it's nothing special and nothing majorly appalling. I had some quibbles with the length of the game, just five stages and no form of extras for the Xbox 360, apart from the leaderboard and achievements. I highly recommend you save your points and avoid this one, unless you’ve really run out of arcade shooters to play.