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Charlie Murder Review – Best Friends and a Band

Written by Austin Griffith

We’ve all been in this situation before. You and your best friend are determined to start a band, but when you become the front man of one with a new group of friends, your ex-best friend decides to sell his soul to the devil and kill you and your band mates with a zombie apocalypse. No? Well Charlie Murder certainly has been.

There’s plenty more to the story then that, but discovering it as you play is one of the best experiences you can have.

Charlie Murder plays near-identically to everybody’s favorite game Castle Crashers, in a sense that it’s primarily a game of side scrolling beat-em-up. Walk to the right, stop, fight a cluster of enemies and try not to die, and then move on. Throughout the game you can pick up short-term weapons, as well as learn “anar-chi” power ups that are bought in the form of tattoos. These screams as I took to calling them can do anything from heal your team mates to shoot balls of fire across the area, depending on what class you choose. You’ll also be met with the occasion Guitar Hero-esque mini game when your band plays a show. These are some of the best parts of the game, and surprisingly some of the most fun I’ve ever had on a downloadable title.charliemurder3

The game also draws similarities to Diablo in the way to loot system works. Enemies will drop loot for any of your four categories of loot: shirts, gloves, hats, and relics, with later items having better stats then ones from the previous levels. This means you’ll constantly be dropping and picking up new pieces of loot to improve your band members performance

As with Castle Crashers, Charlie Murder is a game best played with friends either on the couch or online; I played the entire game with my girlfriend from beginning to end, with a third friend dropping in halfway through, demonstrating another great piece of work in Charlie Murder. When I was level 25, my friend dropped in at level 1. The game appeared to notice that it would be no fun for us to play with such a major difference, because within a matter of minutes he had gained enough “followers” (your level is determined not by experience points, but by your characters in-game twitter followers) to reach my level.

My only complaint with Charlie Murder would be its no so stellar use of checkpoints. Checkpoints occur only when you find a world map, which isn’t as often as you’d like. This means that if you can’t beat a boss, you have to fight your way through the entire dungeon again just hoping to be able to defeat them.

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Throughout Charlie Murders twelve hour campaign, I had some of the best times I’ve ever had in an Xbox Live Arcade game. The team at Ska Studios managed to combine a unique art direction, an amazing soundtrack (available for download here), and a fun twist on the typical beat-em-up game to create a masterpiece that I’d wholeheartedly recommend to all gamers. With four different endings, a new game plus for each, hundreds of pieces of loot, a great story, and a rocking soundtrack, Charlie Murder is as close to a $60 game you’ll ever get at a $10 price tag.

[Buy Charlie Murder – Xbox Live Arcade] [easyreview title=”Charlie Murder Review 9/10” cat1title=”Gameplay 9/10” cat1detail=”” cat1rating=”9/10″ cat2title=”Art Style 9/10” cat2detail=”” cat2rating=”9/10″ cat3title=”Soundtrack 9/10” cat3detail=”” cat3rating=”9/10″ summary=””]

About the author

Austin Griffith

Austin Griffith owns LevelSave.com

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