King of the Arcade XSX Review 6.5/10 "A fun, mini-game-laden budget title" 🕹️ @SuperVillainDev #IndieGame #GameDev

King of the Arcade casts the player as a once-adored arcade master that has now fallen to the lows of living in his mum’s basement, with zero cash and mounting debt. In a last-ditch attempt to get a job, he applies at the local arcade, where the owner recognises him from his glorious gaming past.

Sworn to a life out of the limelight, our protagonist is dragged into a situation where he must once again waggle his joystick better than anyone else, as he strives to best the thugs from a competing arcade at their chosen games…or not, as the case may be.

A smooth game featuring low-poly character models, King of the Arcade is a brief game in terms of the main narrative – you can either ‘get good’ and beat the enemy characters at each of the titles that they guard, or find, ahem… ‘alternative solutions’ – but the number of games available to play – around 40 in total – are mostly fun and familiar.

From light-gun shooters through racers to classic riffs on the golden days of the arcade era - and even a Tiger handheld (@Kingdomfcarts was over the moon with this), there’s a sense of casual enjoyment and accessibility that belies the flat, seemingly AI-voiced characters; wandering third-person camera; slightly cumbersome controls - in the ‘overworld’, not the arcade games themselves – and music, which is of a wide variety of genres through the in-game jukebox, but all feel slightly generic.

Again, this is all excusable when taking the game’s budget price point in mind, as the heart of the game – the arcades – are pretty fun and well-designed for the most part.

SUMMARY

If you are looking for a cheap collection of arcade mini-games, King of the Arcade will certainly keep you entertained for a couple of hours as you wander around, checking out the amusing titles, breezing through the goofy story and setting some high scores.

In terms of the main narrative and presentation, it’s certainly not the game’s strong suit - but is functional enough in terms of the overall part that it plays to make this worth an extra credit or two.