Sudeki - your thoughts thus far...

[Adrian M]

Those of you who subscribe to OXM will have played the SUDEKI demo by now (this month's demo disc is rather weak...NBA Ballers (shudder), Wallace and Grommit and Street Soccer are the only other playables).

I fired it up and tried it out. Not being a huge fan of Japanese-style RPGS (yes, it's developed by Climax, a UK-based company so technically it's NOT Japanese) on the new systems I didn't know what to expect.

 

Well, I'd have to say it's not bad. The demo is rather short (one large room with tons of enemies, a simple move-the-blocks puzzle, and a brief boss battle with some giant spider...nothing too difficult) but you can get a taste of how the realtime fighting works. You can do 1st and a sort of 3rd person view and switch between available characters at any time. The chick has some sort of projectile wand that can take out enemies from a distance while the sword guy does best in melee attacks. There seems to be a simple combo system in place (a little meter shows up to indicate correct combo button presses). Magic is kind of useless in the demo as the enemies you face are nothing too difficult. All in all, I'd prefer this sort of combat system to the boring turn-based crap that you find in the FF games.

 

There does seem to hints of great depth in Sudeki when you check the subscreens. You get a compendium with monsters you've fought, a quest log, lots of items and a decent trading system in place. The overall level of quality and polish seems rather good, considering it's been in development for so long. Nothing mind-blowing to say the least, but I'm basing this opinion off the short demo.

 

Your thoughts and opinions please....

[Clock]

We haven't had the demo yet in the UK but it's coming in the next 2 weeks.

 

Climax are of course the company behind the awesome MOTO GP games and thus I am assuming (hoping) SUDEKI will be a quality game. It's on my must buy list.

[Major Havoc 2049]

Argh, still haven't recieved my OXM for this month. I'm really looking forward to Sudeki. The only games I'm going to buy this summer are Sudeki and Dead or Alive Ultimate and they both look wonderful.

[Major Havoc 2049]

Recieved my issue of OXM yesterday and finished the Sudeki demo. From just the demo, Sudeki has a chance of being a great RPG. The combat is kinda like Phantasy Star Online, only deeper and you can switch to different characters in your party and the enemy AI seems more lively than in PSO. The combat is real time, but when you select the menu to access a different weapon, get a potion, select a special move, spell, etc., the action goes into slow motion/bullet time. So you can't spend all day on the menu screen, or your character will end up taking a lot of damage.

 

The graphics and animation are very nice. Like Adrian said, the whole demo takes place inside a dungeon, in just three rooms and what is there is nice, but nothing special. If you have seen the trailers, then there looks to be some stellar looking outdoor enviornments. There are two in-game cut scenes in the demo and I thought the voice acting was good, but nothing special. In the first cut scene, there are some facial close-ups and I thought the facial expressions and animation was lacking. All the enemies and main characters looked great and the animation was solid during combat. The special moves looked really cool and showed off all the cool particle effects that the Xbox is capable of.

 

If the story is good and if the game isn't plagued by bugs, Sudeki looks to be a good one.

[Adrian M]

Recieved my issue of OXM yesterday and finished the Sudeki demo.  From just the demo, Sudeki has a chance of being a great RPG.  The combat is kinda like Phantasy Star Online, only deeper and you can switch to different characters in your party and the enemy AI seems more lively than in PSO.  The combat is real time, but when you select the menu to access a different weapon, get a potion, select a special move, spell, etc., the action goes into slow motion/bullet time.  So you can't spend all day on the menu screen, or your character will end up taking a lot of damage.

 

The graphics and animation are very nice.  Like Adrian said, the whole demo takes place inside a dungeon, in just three rooms and what is there is nice, but nothing special.  If you have seen the trailers, then there looks to be some stellar looking outdoor enviornments.  There are two in-game cut scenes in the demo and I thought the voice acting was good, but nothing special.  In the first cut scene, there are some facial close-ups and I thought the facial expressions and animation was lacking.  All the enemies and main characters looked great and the animation was solid during combat.  The special moves looked really cool and showed off all the cool particle effects that the Xbox is capable of.

 

If the story is good and if the game isn't plagued by bugs, Sudeki looks to be a good one.

 

Pretty much sums it up. Combat is indeed very similar to PSO except with first person projectile attacking, switching characters, and the bullet-time option screen feature.

 

I just hope that there aren't too many block puzzles in the game...I was sort of shocked to see that they were going the block puzzle route and even went as far as include one in the demo level.

[BydoEmpire]

I rented Ballers for PS2 and I thought it was pretty fun. Definitely better than the last ten NBA Jam clones Midway did. Haven't tried the Sudeki demo yet - the trailers just seemed to look worse and worse each couple of months (they've been running trailers for that game for HOW long? Seems like over a year). Anyways, sounds like I should give it a shot...