"All style and no substance"

When I first bought my xbox, I was overjoyed at the number of quality titles that would be filling the shelves: Halo 2, Fable, Dead or Alive Ultimate and the like. As a big fan of RPG's, I was especially looking forward to Fable. However, as these titles kept being pushed back to ‘put on the finishing touches', I started to become desperate. Then, suddenly, I was looking around my local games store when I saw Sudeki, the long-awaited RPG from Microsoft and Climax. I instantly bought it and popped it into my xbox. At first, I was dazzled by the gorgeous graphics (not to mention the two female characters on the cover), but once I started playing the game, things started going downhill fast. And I mean fast.

GAMEPLAY
Climax did a good job of making the controls fairly smooth and moving the character around fairly easy, but the camera! It's alive!! It has a life of it's own!! Run!!! Oh wait, you can't because you can't see where you're going lol. It's very, very twitchy, and will sometimes rotate around for no particular reason. The combat system is just as bad. There are only a small number of attacks and combos for the two melee characters, and for the two ranged heroes, it's a run-and-gun affair. Don't expect to run far though, as the exit will mysteriously be blocked every time you encounter an enemy. I know what you're thinking. ‘But that's just like ninja gaiden, one of the best action games ever?' true, but in gaiden, it was fun walloping the heads off enemies. In Sudeki, it's just boring and frustrating. Enemies can hit you while you're executing a combo, often leading to the controller being flung to the nearest solid object and hair being pulled out (careful, you elder gamers).

STORY
The story is the usual good vs. evil, heroes against monsters, saving the world malarkey, but it's told and presented in such a cheesy and uninteresting (and sometimes just plain awful) way that it'll either have you snoring or frantically pounding the pad to skip the cut scenes. You'll probably sleep through it.

GRAPHICS/SOUND
The graphics, as mentioned earlier, are beautiful to look at and has a unique style to it. The character and enemy models move fluidly and are well designed and animated. Even the smallest monster has 6000 polygons (according to climax)! The visuals are what really shines about Sudeki. However, the sound. Oh yes, the sound. You probably remember the terrific voice acting and marvelous musical score in SW: KOTOR. Well, don't expect the same in Sudeki, because it has the worst voice acting in the world ever in the history of games! I mean, it's not the kind of bad you can laugh at while playing with a friend. I mean it's so bad you wonder who exactly the voice actors are, and why they haven't been put in a hospital. Thankfully, most of the dialogue is mercifully short, and you can skip it as there really isn't a point in listening. Also, the music is there in the background, but it's so quiet you'll find it hard hearing it with your ear an inch away from the speakers. Needless to say, it doesn't play a big role in creating an atmosphere or tension.

PLAY TIME/REPLAYABILITY
Sudeki can be beaten in around 15-20 hours (30 if you do the pointless side quests), but most gamers will find it hard even to stick to it for that long. It just isn't much fun, and even die-hard RPG fans will struggle to find any replay value, so linear is the game. There aren't any secrets or unlockables, meaning once you're done, you'll want to exchange it for something else.

OVERALL
Even if you desperately feel the need to play an RPG, I recommend you avoid Sudeki. Give it a rental, just to see how much you like it. It could have been the title to pull in more RPG fans towards the xbox, but unfortunately, due to the boring story, twitchy camera, frustrating combat and terrible voice acting, Sudeki becomes one of the most disappointing titles on bill's box.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 08/18/04