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Heres the first in the line of our ‘Arcade Wednesday’ coverage, where we review all of the new arcade games hitting live so that you dont have to waste any money or worry about poor trials. This weeks review is for Triggerheart Exelica.

Triggerheart Exelica is an Anime styled shoot ‘em up which has been out for over a year on other platforms and in arcades and now its on XBLA for 800 MSPoints, is it worth the plunge?

The game has its own style and look to it, which sets it apart from other SHMUP titles available on XBLA, but sadly it also has its own audio style. Ouch. From the moment I started the game up I was greeted with a high pitched Japanese girl wailing ‘Warashi!’ which pretty much set the tone from then on in. While typically arcade-ish in tone, the background music is something I couldnt take for more than 10 minutes and Im struggling to see the benefit of full 5.1 support.

The graphics are reasonable, for a top-down shooter. 90% of the time my screen (which itself only covers a third of the tv screen) seemed to be full of purple or yellow balls, and every now and then a few waves of red, leaving very little time to take in whats going on. Which brings me to the gameplay, which sadly, is also a dissapointment. There is very little need to do anything other than hold the fire button and randomly wiggle the analogue stick, if you’re feeling frisky then you can hit the ’special’ button to hear another Japanese girl screaming and jumping at you. One of the most fun elements of these games is trying to complete that really hard stage over and over untill you finally kill that boss, an element which curiously, has been removed from Triggerheart. The player is presented with unlimited continues meaning that holding the trigger down is actually a valid tactic.

Thankfully, its not all doom and gloom as the game does have a few nice, if not groundbreaking features. The Variable Boss Battle system is a nice touch, if your scores are high, the bosses will be harder and vice versa, which makes those mega-scores truly brag worthy. The gameplay, for all its troubles is still at its core a fun (but dated) experience but not really worth its 800 MSPoint price tag. This game is for the hardcore only, us mere mortals wont last more than 15 minutes before wanting to delete all traces of it, forever.

3/10