Riddled Corpses EX (PS4)

For a developer to elevate the twin-stick shooter in any meaningful way, it must take the intrinsic shoot ’em up elements and transform them. Housemarque’s output over past years with titles like Super Stardust and Resogun prove that paying homage to Robotron: 2084 and Defender can come natural, creating an enthralling game that’s familiar yet fresh. As one of my personal favorite series of all time, Dennaton Game’s Hotline Miami gave players a hyper-violent slice of Florida drowned in neon and synths that still required flexible thumbs and quick reflexes. These are games that make the heart race as bad guys swarm the screen, where any upgrade or resource creates a life-saving space of a few centimeters between the player and certain death.

Riddled Corpses EX aspires to challenge players with frantic gameplay, upgrade paths, and a handful of modes. Originally developed by Diabolical Mind, the one-man studio of Daniel Fernandez Chavez, EX is a port with new bells and whistles brought to the PlayStation 4 and PS Vita by COWCAT, the one-man studio of Fabrice Breton. Indie charm runs rampant between the cracks of Riddled Corpses EX while enjoyable and tense moments are scattered throughout, injecting a sizeable chunk of fun. But the game stumbles in a few key places, pushing it farther away from a truly memorable entry in the genre.

Plots aren’t always necessary elements of a good game, especially in the arcade action-heavy titles that Riddled Corpses takes obvious inspiration from. Meaningful character arcs are great and all, yet they matter very little when the goal is to survive an onslaught of zombies and various nightmarish fauna. Over the course of six stages, Riddled Corpses gives virtually no fat for players to chew on.

The evil being Erebus has unleashed literal hell on Earth, sending waves of zombies and demonic creatures that look ripped from a 16-bit version of Doom to destroy life as we know it. Fighting this menace is a group of ragtag survivors with twin pistols in hands seeking to save anyone in need and put an end to Erebus. Thrown into the mix are friendly demons, greedy scientists, and a time-traveling cop.

Whether you followed any of that or not has little to no bearing on your enjoyment of Riddled Corpses as a game. Players can accidentally skip seconds-long cutscenes with the press of a button and miss out of on a few boxes of exposition. The story is completely non-invasive and barely asks anything of the player outside of providing context for who a handful of key roles are.

If one were to clock the actual amount of story told, it might be the sum total of the commercial breaks during a 30-minute TV show. What’s there is mildly entertaining with echoes of Chrono Trigger and Resident Evil but don’t let the two anime girls gracing the promotional art fool you, in a matter of days the story of Riddled Corpses will get lost in the dark corners of your brain.

What becomes most appealing about the game is the top-down, wave-based shooting that would fit right into a decade’s-old arcade cabinet. The left stick moves the player around, the right stick shoots in the direction pointed at, and three buttons activate items. At the onset of a stage, coffins burst from the ground and zombies emerge from them seconds later. The stage will slowly scroll as players wipe out shambling zombies whose only purpose is to fill the screen and take away a life if touched.

Players can take an enemy out of the equation by moving over its coffin before it fully spawns. But soon into the first stage, enemies begin to shoot out a singular pink projectile after they spawn. Initially, this only happens a few times but as stages progress, nearly every spawning enemy shoots out a projectile. Starting with the second stage, larger stationary monsters such as a massive skull or bony staff sprout up and spew patterns of projectiles. With the addition of dozens of enemies on screen at once, Riddled Corpses begins to show its other form, that of a bullet hell shooter.

In between this action the stage will stop scrolling and freeze, indicating that an enemy wave is coming and needs to be cleared. Interestingly, these waves aren’t based on sheer numbers but on time. No matter how many enemies a player kills, it will have no effect on draining the time bar at the bottom of the screen.

On one hand, this is an odd mechanic because players can allow the screen to be flooded with enemies and make zig-zagging between hordes nearly impossible. Riddled Corpses implements a combo meter that charges with each enemy killed. Once the combo bar is full, players deal additional damage and their shots fire faster. As long as enemies die fast enough the combo bonus won’t go away, incentivizing players to always have enemies to shoot at.

This creates a fun juggling act by kiting around a trail of undead until the perfect moment to do massive damage and clear out waves with more efficiency arrives. However, the whole timed aspect of enemy waves can create large difficulty spikes in a few of the levels. Enemies will randomly spawn on the screen at any place the player isn’t standing, meaning that as the difficulty ramps up, there isn’t a lot of breathing room.

Two items are meant to alleviate some of the pressure: dynamite and clocks. Dynamite instantly kills every normal enemy on screen, wipes out any projectiles, and shaves chunks of health off larger foes. The dynamite is an essential gulp of air that truly can save a life. The purpose of the clock is to temporarily stop enemy movement and slow or stop the projectiles of bosses and bullet towers. Clocks are great because they freeze everything in place and give players a chance to refocus their attacks on a more worrisome section of the screen. Unfortunately, while time is frozen players can still lose a life by touching anything hazardous and the wave timer does not tick down. This means that any effort made to clear the screen is soon lost as another flood of enemies crops up within a few seconds.

The normal gameplay loop of zipping around a stage creating pathways between death is a fun one. But unless properly prepared, progress will come screeching to a halt around the fourth stage. Before this, I had only hit one difficulty spike during the second stage when enemies suddenly became more frequent and gained more health. Yet in the fourth stage during the second attack wave, players are stuck on a screen where a fourth of it is covered by a large chunk of lava that instantly takes away a life when touched. It’s here that the flying gargoyles, shielded plant-looking things, and walking skull creatures spawned too frequently and couldn’t be downed in enough time to create a safe path for traversal.

The latter half of Riddled Corpses has a handful of moments like this where, despite a properly-leveled character and a decent amount of skill, the odds against players are too great. In similar games the opportunity always exists to achieve victory with a shred of your life still intact with some wise movement and smart thinking. I don’t think these kinds of opportunities exist here and the difficulty spikes are more of a brick wall meant to force players to improve their damage through grinding.

Yes, that’s right, Riddled Corpses has a system in place where grinding leads to victory. Over the course of the game, six playable characters can be unlocked but players are only given Jon to start with. Jon is your average guy with normal movement speed, average firing rate, and decent damage. Just like he did with me, Jon will get most players efficiently through the game until that fourth stage wall. Jon, like all the other characters in the game, can level up his damage output by banking in the gold that is collected from downed enemies. Players might think it is a good idea to keep pumping money into Jon to upgrade him but it’s not.

When I began grinding gold in Riddled Corpses, I realized the upgrade system was a bit like an upside-down pyramid scheme. As with any game where a character becomes stronger with more experience, I thought it would be a good idea to make Jon strong so I could save up money to afford unlocking other characters down the line. I first started grinding experience for Jon after I hit that difficulty spike in the second stage. Because the gold requirement to raise levels increased each time, I had a few options. I could play the first stage multiple times to get Jon up to snuff, or I could play the opening parts of the second stage multiple times before it got too difficult and benefit from the better gold drops. Obviously, I went with the latter.

Sadly, even after getting Jon to level 20 (the max for all characters) I still wasn’t able to push him deep enough in the fourth stage to survive. So, I decided to put money into Cloe, who costed 2,000 gold and had a special ability that sucked in nearby gold. Unlike Jon, Cloe had very fast movement speed but much lower damage. I decided to grind out gold with Jon until I could get Cloe to a comfortable place. After about a half hour I got tired of this grind and tried out Cloe in the fourth level just for fun. I noticed that I could stick Cloe in the corner of the screen, get my combo quick, and do enough damage to survive until that punishing second wave. You see, unlike Jon, Cloe doesn’t have to run over gold to collect it. Even on the opposite end of the screen gold will come flying to her.

While this seemed like a great plan, upgrading was getting pricey and I noticed that the next character I could unlock for 5,000 gold actually earned double the gold. For some reason, players can’t see the stats of other characters until they are purchased so I just assumed Liery would be decent enough to justify the influx of gold. Because Liery was not strong enough I played through the first three stages as Cloe and got enough gold to level up Liery. This loop of grinding for gold continued for the fourth unlockable character Fael, whose only good stat was that he had maxed out damage. But what’s the point of using an underleveled character when the previous one is already good enough? Well, I had to dump money into leveling up Fael (despite only playing him for maybe five minutes) because Erika, the last unlockable character could only be purchased for 9,999 gold when everyone but Jon was leveled up to 20.

I checked my time with Riddled Corpses after I had fully leveled up all five characters and saw that I had put in about eight hours of work. I was a bit frustrated because it felt like all previous characters only served as a gateway to Erika, who had all abilities of the other characters. Rather than a rewarding grind, I was left with the feeling that I had wasted time with Jon and should have gotten the 2,000 gold to unlock Cloe. Considering all characters felt like their damage output was virtually the same at max level, the whole aspect of actually having multiple characters seems pointless.

Most of Riddled Corpses is repetitive, there’s no denying that. The gruesome impression of a boss is lost after the first couple times when you realize they just serve as a passable bullet hell baddie. Since enemies don’t really do anything aside from walk and shoot out a projectile, they don’t come across as interesting or special since nothing differentiates them outside of size and looks.

I enjoyed the Arcade mode because it starts players out with no upgrades and forces them to perform well to improve their guns and get money to buy lives and items. But even that mode becomes trivial if you’ve upgraded Erika or Nora, the cop from the future who becomes available after beating the story. The same applies to Survival, which throws endless numbers your way in the hopes of topping the leaderboards. Adding couch co-op to the mix can alleviate some of the game’s difficulty and make it more entertaining for both players. Some may also appreciate the addition of visual modes such as scanlines or a CRT filter, which actually smooth out the over-pixelated look of the game.

Despite all of these flaws, Riddled Corpses EX still manages to be capable of fun. Once I got past the repetitive grind, I enjoyed zooming through the story and feeling like a demon-killing badass. The 16-bit visuals toe the line between cool and clumsy because often enough, details blur together; this is more Final Fantasy IV than VI. And for persistent players, the game’s Platinum trophy can be acquired in under 10 hours, which definitely has it’s own addictive appeal. It would be nearly impossible to recommend Riddled Corpses EX if it were a high-priced game that promised innovative gameplay and fresh new ideas. This is a twin-stick shooter that would feel at home as a Konami title during the mid 90s. With an engaging enough gameplay core, it’s certainly a good ride, especially if you have any desire to climb the leaderboards once your weekend with it is over.