Sometimes you look at a game and see what it is, and sometimes you look at it and see what might have been. Sudeki is the kind of game the Xbox is sorely lacking: a Role Playing Game (RPG). And as much as I enjoyed it, I now spend most of my time nitpicking on small issues that in the end keep this game from being a classic.
The game (and over world) of Sudeki takes place on two separate dimensions, with the two dimensions representing polar opposites of one another. The game uses light and dark to represent these two worlds, and you can clearly see that tone whenever you’re in each dimension. You’ll start the game in the land of Haskilla (light world) playing as the ultimate hero Tal; a sword wielding melee fighter. You’ll eventually be joined by Ailish (your semi love interest and healer), Buki (a spiritually inclined animal fighter), and Elco (a gun wielding scientist who believes only what he can prove). It won’t take long for you to finally meet up with the rest of your group and fight in a party of four.
Each of your four characters has their own unique abilities that you’ll have to use to solve puzzles and continue on past locked portions of the game. Tal can move objects, Ailish can reveal hidden items with her magic, Buki can use her claws to climb up walls, and Elco can use his jet pack to float from platform to platform. You will find yourself often times needing to use all of these skills from each individual to move on to locked areas, and even to reveal hidden or rare items. Thinking back to my experience, most puzzles you encounter aren’t overly difficult to figure out, but they can be time consuming as you must separately select each character and move them about to solve whatever task is at hand.
In addition to unique skills, each character also tailors themselves to a specific kind of fighting style. Tal is the consummate warrior: he uses his blade for melee attacks against foes, and has magical abilities that lend themselves to the physical part of fighting. Ailish is your healer: they’re found in every game, and she’s exactly what you’d expect from a healer (weak, but extremely valuable). Buki is an animalistic warrior through and through, and should be used as a walking tank. Finally Elco is a spell caster that uses powerful (yet very slow firing) weapons, and has a few magic abilities that are beneficial to the entire party.
Even though each character lends itself to a certain kind of playing style you’re still given the ability to mold your character as you see fit. As you gain experience points, and increase your level in the game, you have the ability to specifically raise one of four attributes: Health, Skills (which allows you to cast more spells), Power (which increases your physical strength), and Essence (which increases your magical strength). You could in theory build up your characters as you see fit, but having only four characters total to choose from, it’s not wise to go against the grain in Sudeki.
In addition to increasing your attributes through gained experience, you can also instantly increase your character through “one time use” orbs. These hidden orbs (scattered all throughout the land) can permanently raise any of your attributes as soon as you use them.
Besides being able to raise your attributes permanently you can also attach runes to your weapons and armor. These runes bestow abilities to your character as soon as you begin a battle, but they come with a catch: you’ll have to pay a magical blacksmith to do it. And since money is very tight in Sudeki, you’ll only be able to do this a few times to a few specific weapons (so choose wisely).
Fighting in the game will depend entirely on the character you choose to control. Sudeki is not a turn based RPG (where each side gets its turn to attack). It’s real-time and you only have the ability to control one character at a time. You can easily switch between characters, and can even set up each character to do one of 3 things when you’re not controlling them. You can set them to attack, defend, or just plain run away from battle. Although those 3 options make the game much more action packed, they can be frustrating because most Role Playing Games give you the ability to micro manage how your character will act. A welcome addition would have been to allow the player to force someone like Ailish to automatically heal your party when its Health got down to a certain level.
Your melee characters (Tal, Buki) play a lot like a generic fighting game. You can press A button or X button in any order three times; or you can mix and match between buttons. If you time it right you’ll be able to chain three attacks together, and your final strike will be more powerful than normal. Each pressed button combination will result in a different kind of combo, and each combo can take differing amounts of time to complete. The faster combos do less damage while the ones that take longer to complete obviously do more damage. You will have to learn which combo to use and when, because you may find yourself hit in the middle of your combo (and subsequently having your attacks interrupted) because it’s taking too long to complete.
The other downfall of not being able to set your spell casters to do more specific things is that you’ll spend very little of your time actually using your melee attackers. You’ll be focusing far more on casting the beneficial attacks Ailish and Elco can unleash.
There is an opposing dichotomy in Sudeki that just rubs me the wrong way for some reason. You should be building up each character so that it’s beneficial to the group as a whole, but the developers of the title, Climax, decided to add in many portions of the game where each character will have to do battle alone. It's these portions that might end up giving you the most grief. As a word of warning, be carefull who you give your one time use orbs too. The game will make it obvious to you who the big hero is, and you should follow that lead when handing out these prized orbs.
The story in the game is well thought out, and executed pretty well, but there’s at least one brain scratcher moment that kind of just defies logic. I don’t want to ruin the story, so I’ll avoid spoilers, but you’ll know it when you get to it. The question you’ll be asking yourself might be:”How is it possible that these people can meet up, and one completely and totally over takes the other? Why is that?” There are quite a few light and dark world head scratchers, but it doesn’t totally hinder the game. I guess you could say it’s a complement that the story in Sudeki manages to raise your IQ as you think of how things should flow logically. The story though is what turned out to be my greatest gripe with the game. Despite the fact that what’s there is pretty good -- what’s not there is what’ll leave you wanting more. There are just so many plot points that are introduced that get absolutely no pay off or resolution after you finally defeat the ultimate evil. The worst part isn’t even that those points get no final wrap-up; it’s that you really get nothing for beating such a story driven game. I almost literally mean that – there’s about a 20 second voice over that is given to you as your pay off for beating Sudeki. That’s almost unforgivable given the genre this title is in.
The graphics are pretty good, as is the sound. The character models are nice, and the environments bring the worlds to life. The characters move with fluid animation, and each strike of your blade, or cast of a spell, brings some kind of effect on screen. The worlds are dark and dreary where they should be, and light and vibrant when you most expect it. You can definately tell however that more emphasis is put on the characters than the environments. Case in point, though it's not a big issue or anything, the world of Sudeki is far more linear and straight forward than it should probably be for an RPG. You won't be doing a whole lot of open-ended exploring, because there just aren't all that many places you can go off and explore. You'll often see places that you'll never actually get to, looming off in the distance, and are instead forced to stay on the beaten path. There’s nothing revolutionary at play in Sudeki, but the graphics complement the game very well. The sound and more specifically the voice acting have plenty of little odes to Canadians (although Climax is based out of the UK... hmmm). You’ll find liberal use of the word “eh” in the game and it’s a nice touch (if you know that Canadian’s tend to use that word a lot). The cheap accents that get thrown in for the sake of not giving away that a few people are pulling double duty on the voices will make you cringe in a few places, but overall I liked the feeling that was put into the acting.
I had a good time playing Sudeki, and have no issues with recommending you give it a chance, but there are just so many things that could have been done to make this game a classic that never saw their way through to conclusion. If you play Sudeki, and think you can you overlook a few of the minor issues (story included), you shouldn’t have trouble enjoying it, otherwise be warned that you may get an empty feeling after you finish up with this game.
