Triggerheart Exelica on Xbox LIVE Arcade

by darkmurder

©2008 Noel Schneider

`“Triggerheart Exelica was to say the least a very, very late bloomer, released in Japanese arcades in 2006 and the Dreamcast in 2007, it finally made its way across in 2008 to the Xbox 360. For an arcade and inferior console port, can it hold its own on a far more superior console?

“`Triggerheart is a hybrid 2d/3d vertically scrolling shoot em up which is very similar to games such as the classic 1942. The 3d graphics that are used are your standard Xbox Live Arcade’s 3d graphics, they are clearly an advancement over the Dreamcast (as you’d expect) but they didn’t use the potential that was available. Like with most of the Dreamcast sidescrollers, Triggerheart uses the 3d graphics for the background and enemies in a birds eye view, but where it lets itself down is within the enemy’s fire directed towards you. The “bullets” which are fired from the enemy’s are very shoddy and look as if it took only a few minutes to make and the lack of different ammunition really makes the game lack some fresh diversity.

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It attempts to tie in a storyline that really doesn’t do the game justice as all in all, there’s about 5 lines of dialogue with most of it spoken in Japanese anyway. The port came from Japanese, but that doesn’t excuse the corny attempts for them to speak English. A perfect example is with the “Warning” from the narrator, it just makes the game seem stuck in two minds as to whether they are targeting at the Western Market, or trying to keep it like the original.

The gameplay is what the game solely relies on and is very simple. However, for the genre it was based in that has been done to death countless times, it needed some originality. There has been an attempt to try to improve it over the original successors, but it relies far too heavily on the mechanics of the games which have already added fresh new twists to the genre.

It is essentially 1942 without the barrel rolls and all it really adds are bombs to wipe the whole screen (thanks Geometry Wars) and an ‘anchor’ feature. The anchor feature is an interesting concept where you need to grab the enemy with an anchor that comes from your character and you can then hurl it back at the enemy. It can destroy multiple enemies at once (like the bomb) and can also destroy any bullets heading your way.

This is where Triggerheart is at its most frustrating, the screen is constantly littered with the enemies ammunition, that it is downright impossible to evade bullet after bullet. It is this constant death that also leads to the major downfall of the game, Triggerheart is far too easy. Basically, it selects the difficulty for you based on your performance within the game and it features two “I win” buttons.

The first is the bomb, which clears everything off the screen, the bomb can single-handedly destroy the first two bosses of the first two stages (with five in total). The second is the start button, every time you die, you get the chance to continue, this is where Triggerheart needs to learn from the success of the arcade machines. It really needed to limit the amounts of continues that are available to the player, as it is impossible to die without pressing no.

It also appears that they want you to consistently keep playing on, with the continue countdowner taking about three seconds for every second that should be counted down from 10. It is this inability to die that is the major flaw of Triggerheart, but in reality it makes sense. Had they not implemented the chance to continue, it would be worse off for the fact that the screen is cluttered with bullets and you die so often it is not funny.

Triggerheart is a very basic game that would have been revolutionary had it been released in the 1980′s. The game is very linear and is far too simple to fully enjoy the fun that could have been had here. For games of this type of genre, you really need to implement new innovations with a fresh new gameplay twist for the game to be a success.

Triggerheart just appears to rip everything off all of the good, simple and successful games (even the music from the boss fights sounds like a song off of Pokemon). Triggerheart really should have stayed where it was meant to be, on the arcade machine and is one of the most unoriginal games that has ever come into my grasps.

• Gameplay: 5/10

• Longevity: 4/10

• Graphics: 7/10

• Sound: 6/10

“Overall: 5.5/10

©2008 Noel Schneider

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