With the glut of games this holiday season, I thought I’d take time to review an XBLA title instead of play Call of Duty, Gears of War 2, Fable II, Fallout 3, Dead Space, Mirror’s Edge, etc.

Was it worth it? Find out, after the jump!

When I first booted up good ol’ Vigilante 8 Arcade, I decided to figure out what the hell I was meant to be doing so, and I’m sure you would have done the same, I moseyed on down to the ‘Help & Options’ menu option and, with sufficient depressing of the bulging green ‘A’ button, selected it. I then proceeded to head over to the ‘How to Play’ option and, again, with a simple press of our trusty ‘A’, I was in. But what bountiful things did the menu hold?

Five one sentence bullet points appeared on screen and so, looking for the detailed instructions, I pressed the ‘A’ button in order to navigate to the next slide. Nothing happened. A quick press of the grumpy ‘B’ button resulted in the same outcome. I tried every button on the controller and after a consecutive series of failures I resolved that there was only the slide. Here’s what those five bullet points said:

Drive your car all over the place…
Collect weapons & power-ups…
Locate enemy vehicles and Fire at will…
Destroy enemies with Flair…
Stay alive and have a blast!

It wasn’t much to go on, but after a quick glance at the controls I jumped into my first ‘Quest’. I wrap the word ‘quest’ in single quotation marks because…well, they’re hardly crucial tasks of epic grandeur are they? ‘Mission’ would have been more appropriate. And this key fault in terminology is the sole reason why you must not buy this game!

I kid, I kid.

It's Molo!

Anyway, you can choose from a number of characters and vehicles for your ‘quest’, but I chose Molo, a repeat juvenile offender driving a prison transport bus. Each of the vehicles have different stats, such as acceleration, strength and top speed, but strength is the only one I see a use for, and the bus has plenty of that.

The games HUD is simple, with a map, health bar and a top down layout of the face buttons to let you know which weapons you have and as I began to play, I realized that the game’s minimalist instructions actually tell you all you need to know. I drove forwards towards what look like a weapon and, sure enough, some small text flashed up on the bottom of the screen saying ‘Rockets’, to which I replied “Rockets are adept at destroying vehicles “. With this new found knowledge, the ‘X’ button on the HUD now had a small rocket logo on it, and a quick tap of said button launched a single rocket towards my nearest opponent, upon which his health bar decreased.

Targeting is automatic, so as long as there’s two red triangles around a foe, then your guaranteed to hit him, which is by no means a bad thing.

As I frolicked about the green pastures of the battle arena, picking up weapons and unloading them onto my adversaries, everything began to make sense. The singleplayer is boring as hell, the online is average at best, but where the game really shines is splitscreen multiplayer (where both Deathmatch and Team Co-op modes are available). Like so many games nowadays (read: Rock Band and all that lot), Vigilante 8 Arcade is best played with three other mates, a bag of Doritos and a couple of hours to kill. Laughter, abuse and split Dorito dip ensue and ultimately isn’t that what gaming is all about?

Not really, no.

So, all in all I can’t recommend Vigilante 8 Arcade to you, unless you happen to own a large dungeon with a collection of friends that can be wheeled out at any time to play video games, and, to be honest, that’s not particularly likely is it now?

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