Available Platforms: Xbox One and Xbox Series
Reviewed On: Xbox Series X
Nostalgia can be a hell of a way to rope you in. There’s a certain fondness for the seedy arcade that tugs on the heartstrings of people my age (40+), even though I personally never experienced one. No, most of my arcade experiences were quite tame. There was no smoking or drinking in the ones I would go to in my youth. The arcades I frequented were cookie-cutter things – designed to be safe and inviting for families to go and spend some time rather than the “drug dens” they were portrayed as in their heydays. The ones I spent time in weren’t necessarily as glossy as the home of one Charles Entertainment Cheese, but certainly nothing most parents would worry about their 9-year-old kid wandering around with a pocket full of quarters.
I bring up that to say this – King of the Arcade plays on the nostalgia of those type of arcades while ultimately playing it so overly safe that one would feel more in danger at a Dairy Queen in the middle of the day. It stands on the shoulders of giants with a premise that, on paper, seems like a fun way to experience very-slightly-more-modern takes on classic arcade games. Instead, it ends up coming across as having no real sense of purpose beyond “hey, remember arcades?”
Hoping to lure you in with the promise of playing competent games similar to Street Fighter, Space Harrier, Double Dragon, Daytona, Donkey Kong, or just straight-up Space Invaders with a different name, King of the Arcade feels more like it’s preying on nostalgia than hoping to capture the feel of any of those far-superior titles.
You play a washed-up game champion. You were on top of the gaming world at one point, but time has moved on and left your accomplishments a relic of a bygone era. Looking for work, you wander into an arcade that’s holding out on getting the gimmicky games you might see at a Dave and Buster’s or their ilk. This arcade is hanging onto the draw of being a place that you can plunk some quarters into a machine and have a good time. Some rich jackass wants to takeover the arcade and turn it into the aforementioned gimmick-game arcades and sends a squad of goons to take it over. You, being a former champion, offer to take on the goons and save the arcade.
Taking them on involves you beating a series of challenges in a game of their choice and speciality. They’re all fairly simple (get so many points, win a race, etc.) and should serve as a fun introduction to each of these games. Think Retro Game Challenge on the DS and you’re at least headed in the right direction. With that in mind, this game also sort of plays on the nostalgia for RGC, but, much like the different arcade games it tries to emulate, misses the mark by a wide margin on that front.
Where RGC succeeds (witty and interesting dialogue as well as the knock-off games being fun), King of the Arcade stumbles gloriously. The best of the games are competent-if-uninspired knock-offs, while the rest are boring, play poorly, or both. Each of the games that you play are more akin to the movies you’d find in a grocery store DVD dump bin that are trying to cash in on the popularity of the latest Disney movie. On paper, it sure seems like it would be the same thing. But once you get into them, you can see why most of the original games these are copying were so good back then – they’re still enjoyable to play today. King of the Arcade’s offerings are not.
The challenges in Retro Game Challenge invite you to play the games offered in different ways, adding incentive to go back and try some of the new tricks the challenges taught you. Once you finished the challenges, the games felt worth playing on their own. The challenges in King of the Arcade are so easily achieved, you never get the sense that there’s anything interesting about the games beyond the surface level nostalgia grab that they’re going for. In that sense, I suppose that’s the most successful aspect of them because there just isn’t anything more than that.
The writing and voice acting are also middling-to-bad quality. No, I wasn’t expecting much, but even with my expectations low, they still managed to to fall short. The theme of “it’s okay that you’re older” is fine when done correctly. Top Gun: Maverick does it in an entertaining, if a little obvious, manner. Maverick should be too old to perform the way he did 30+ years ago, but when things go south, he comes through as the only one who could save the day, outshining his fellow, considerably younger pilots (never mind the technology of the aircraft that are used). In King of the Arcade, your ability to play old video games saves the day. Poke around in the arcade a bit, and you’ll find a woman who serves as little more than a considerably-younger trophy for you to collect. The whole thing feels like a pushback against someone from my generation hitting middle age that plays out as a poorly written and acted middle-school creative-writing project.
I picked up King of the Arcade with the hope that a few of these games would scratch an itch for some of the classics they’re based on. Instead, it made me appreciate the originals all the more. As I mentioned earlier, it really does go to show why they were knocked off in the first place – they’re fun games with great design. If you’re hoping for a competent compilation of remakes of arcade classics, you’ll have to look elsewhere. There’s a charm in the idea of King of the Arcade that just doesn’t translate to the final product.
