The Showdown Effect Review

Once again, Arrowhead Studios, the team responsible for the wonderfully creative but equally unwieldy Magicka, have come up with something fairly unique. The Showdown Effect is a 2D shoot’em (or slash ’em) up with platforming and character customization. Sounds familiar enough, but wait! There is only one mode, and it’s a game-changer: multiplayer deathmatch. Ok, maybe it doesn’t sound that exciting on the surface, but the gameplay elements so often found in singleplayer or co-operative adventures have great untapped potential for competitive multiplayer, and the folks at Arrowhead have seen this potential. As the player, it is clear that they have, and they let you see the potential as well, but what is even more clear is that The Showdown Effect while occasionally enjoyable generally fails to live up to this potential.

The premise for The Showdown Effect’s frantic action is fairly simple: you and up to seven other players will choose a character with a pre-determined loadout and duke it out for a few minutes on one of the game’s four maps. You get to choose from a variety of characters who apart from having different appearances and quips will come with a unique special ability. Apart from this ability, each character gets to choose any combination of two weapons from the same rather limited pool. Once you enter a match, you cannot change your character or loadout until either you have left or the match has ended. On a base level the concept is sound if not a bit too straightforward and if you manage to get into a good match with low latency players of similar skill levels the game can be quite fun. Sadly such matches are very hard to come by.

The gameplay in The Showdown Effect is lightning fast, as you can move around the environment very quickly, climbing up walls, jumping into vents and ducking out of the way of enemy fire. You can slide, roll, jump and block your way out of many situations, but you will need lightning reflexes if you want to climb to the top of the leader board. Making the gameplay further challenging is the fact that you can’t aim past someone and still hit them with a firearm, you need to have your reticule right on the player, and when they are moving around as quickly as described above, this is a very challenging task. There is a bare-bones training room where you can try and come to terms with the controls, but apart from that, you will need to hone your skills in-game against other players. Prepare to die a lot in your first few matches.

In terms of an arsenal, there is currently a modest selection of firearms and melee weapons that can be easily unlocked within the first couple hours of play. There are also a variety of melee weapons that can be picked up from the levels which range from swords to bags of money. Everything after this is cosmetic, including a substantial number of items that can be bought using real money. Microtransations feel very much out of place in this game since you have to put down some cash up-front, although the number of skins for both weapons and characters you can unlock with in-game currency you earn through playing is fairly substantial. Most weapons feel good to use, and both melee and ranged combat is viable, although weapon balance at the moment is extremely dubious. It is difficult to find a scenario where a machinegun can be bested with a shotgun or pistol, and some weapons such as throwing knives can be spammed to great effect.

The primary mode that ranked matches use is Showdown, which is basically a free-for-all until at the end respawning is disabled and the last player alive takes a substantial bonus of points towards increasing their ladder rank. Right now, there are very few people playing the game, and the matchmaking system for ranked games is not only slow but routinely placed me in games with players of wildly variable ranks and skill levels who often had very high ping. Lag is a very common issue in The Showdown Effect, and the high-paced, precise nature of the game is greatly undermined by its presence and prevalence. Custom games often fare a bit better, and even have a couple of different modes and custom rule sets for limiting loadouts and changing damage amounts. However there is no way of displaying ping in the server browser so it is impossible to know how much lag a game will have until you join it. There are currently only four maps on which the fighting takes place in both ranked and custom games, and while they are all good, it becomes repetitive fighting on the same levels with the same handful of weapons after a fairly short period of time.

While the gameplay design of The Showdown Effect may be fairly unique, the theme of 90’s action movie heroes is less remarkable. The characters you choose to play as will spout quips that are not particularly funny or clever, and while they can be amusing at first, they start to grate after a few hours of hearing the same lines over, and over, and over again. Many of the costumes you unlock allow you to change the appearance of your player to mirror these action heroes, although the voice is always tied to your character. If you want a character dressed like Neo from the Matrix who sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger, the game fully supports it.

The visuals of The Showdown Effect are straightforward but effective, with heavy cell shading displaying the levels in adequate detail. The basic visuals means the game runs well on modest hardware, which is fortunate since there are essentially no options for tinkering with the graphics settings apart from screen resolution, which did not even work properly for me. Game stability is more of an issue, and apart from the serious lag problems in multiplayer, I experienced crashes when trying to join one of the custom game modes. The Showdown Effect would certainly have benefited from an extended beta period to squash some of the issues with net code and game stability.

The audio of the game fares somewhat better, with good weapon and ambient sound effects. Audio plays an important role in The Showdown Effect as you can only see other players that are in your line of sight, but you can often track down someone by listening to the grunts they make while traversing the levels. The music of the game is also quite good, with catchy heavy metal guitar riffs playing on menus and at the end of matches when the Showdown between players begins. The only sore point is the hammy voice acting associated with the different characters that you will probably get tired of rather quickly.

If The Showdown Effect was a polished game with a large community, balanced weapons and good netcode it would be a decent 2D multiplayer game with some good ideas but a serious lack of content and a gimmicky 90’s action hero theme. However in its current state with a borderline non-existent community, poorly balanced weapons and general lack of stability it serves primarily as a window into what could have been rather than what is. With the micro-transaction store already in place and an emphasis on cosmetic unlocks, The Showdown Effect feels like it should be a free to play game, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes that route in the future after some of its current issues have been resolved.