What otaku crave!

Has been a time i dont spend a good time with a side scrolling game, and this one did keep me playing for a bit! Raskulls from Halfbrick is the second title taking part in “Games for the Holidays” along with A World of Keflings and Ilomilo, it is hard to define Raskulls as a simple platformer because is much more.

Story
Campaign is what is known as the Mega Quest, Space pirats want get the Shiny stone to powerup their ship and as you avoid that to happen your leg is injured and now you must train a novice, Dragon. In a silly attempt to save the stone the king offer it as the main prize for the winner of the race, but what if the thieves win? so now is up to Dragon to save the kindom, the stone and earn the love of a cute raskull.


The game is a mix of platformer, racing and puzzle all in one game, levels are filled with blocks that can be destroyed by using your magic wand, here a reference that comes to mind is Tetris, as you destroy blocks those of the same color will merge creating bigger blocks.



Powerups among the blocks help to fill your Frenzy bar, once is fully charged you can go into frenzy mode, run and zap faster, this also helps to attack and charge rivals in the race, it is important to master frenzy mode to win some of the races.


The races can be a mix of challenges, races versus opponents and time trials, giving the game variety to keep you interested in the campaign, the challenges also unlock cheats to use in the mega quest, avatar awards and new characters to play in multiplayer mode.


The cartoon like graphics are well complemented with a dose of humor, but music could have been better.



multiplayer
with the campaign done there’s not much to do but racing against friends in local or via xbox live, up to 4 players can join and there are differences between local and online, local give you the choice to pick a quick race and 1 of 4 grand prix races, online give you only a grand prix but this is not as bad as it sounds as there is a variety of maps to chose from. Hopefully there will be DLC giving us more maps to pick from, and maybe more characters to race with.




Extras
Games for the Holidays give us a plus that’s more than welcome, if you unlocked achievements in A World of Keflings and Ilomilo the cross-title with let us obtain skins and special items in Raskulls, this is one of the attractives not just of this game but the 3 titles taking part in this cross-title, a good way to promote and encourage people to get all 3 titles for their collection.



Overall
Raskulls is a title that can be loved or a dissapointment for the player, if you like the a side scrolling platformer with a feel of Mario, a mix of race and puzzles, then i highly reccomend it, if the genre is not your style the game may get boring fast but still.. is worth a try, for 800 MS Points Raskulls is a good game.




we give it an 8 out of 10




~Mario
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