Guilt Battle Arena is a fun game with a simple yet innovative combat system allowing everyone to enjoy it. While there is not much depth to the game, it will definitely be a fun one to break out at gatherings and rage at your friends with for a little while.
Guilt Battle arena is a quirky 2D party fighter by indie dev team, Invincible Cat. Take your lone, trusty bullet and start shooting your enemies, friends, and family as a part of the GUILT patrol in order to stop the Dreadful Judge and his minions. The simplified combat system makes it easy to pick up and enjoy right away. Add some exploding chickens and bullet stealing ghosts to the mix and you’ve got quite a charming little experience that you and up to three others can enjoy.
Appearance wise this game is clean and appealing. Guilt Battle Arena uses a cartoonish style for its graphics and I find that this was a smart move. For a fun party game, what better way to draw you in than with a goofy cast of fun looking characters. Although there is no difference in game play from character to character, the large amount of characters to unlock adds a fun element to the game to make it worth grinding for. To add to my appreciation for the graphics, I believe that games that choose to have a stylistic aesthetic tend to age better as well. It’s nice to have funny and pleasing visuals to look at while playing a fighting/party game.
As far as the gameplay goes, it’s just like I said above, you get one bullet. One. You must take that bullet and either shoot waves of enemies in single player, or your buds in multiplayer and once you shoot it, you have to go retrieve it before you can shoot. The shooting portion of the gameplay is unique and adds a layer of depth to the fights you get in as you must think about if and how you will be able to get your bullet back safely. Your selected character, be it a bull, an angel cat, a green beret or otherwise can double jump and dash on the ground or in air. The movement options give the game slightly more depth, but it is somewhat difficult to truly enjoy in the small space provided on the stages. The game offers a story mode and a local multiplayer battle mode. Story mode, which you can play through solo or with a friend, consists of a handful of levels that pit you against waves of enemies, and that’s essentially what the story mode revolves around. Although it is enjoyable at first, it does start to feel slightly tedious and repetitive. The wave-based games play out with you trying to achieve up to three stars depending on how many enemies you kill before you lose your three lives. I enjoyed the story mode, but at times it felt like a minigame of something larger. In my eyes the real draw of this game lies in its multiplayer experience.
In multiplayer you and up to three other friends can fight it out in a variety of game modes like straight up death match, or Hot potato, or even a mode where you must avoid exploding chickens while fighting. In the arena with your friends it gets chaotic and ridiculous, as a party game should. The multiplayer is nice but to really enjoy it I feel you need at least three people. There isn’t much to playing 1v1s; it gets stale pretty quickly and some of the game modes just don’t really work that well with only two players. With only local multiplayer this can be somewhat difficult to make happens at times. Current generation consoles don’t care as much about local multiplayer in this age because it just doesn’t happen enough. With how expensive PS4 controllers are, people rarely have more than two and it isn’t always easy to convince someone to come over and bring their PS4 controller when they would probably rather play from home. The reason I’m somewhat hung up on this is that there is no online component to match make and find others to play with. To be able to search for matches and create lobbies online so you could always get three or four players would be a blast. Although I don’t know the circumstances or how difficult it would be to implement but an online mode would absolutely increase the longevity of the game in my opinion.
Overall it’s a unique party game to bust out once in a while if you have friends over, but not something very competitive that will hook you and keep you playing for hours. The game may be fun for a little while, but there isn’t enough to it to justify playing it very often or, honestly, even beating the story mode. The game has been set at a $15.00 price point, but I believe a more fair price may be around $5.00 given the amount of content and playtime. In the end I’d give this game a 6/10.
