Charlie Murder product reviews

Your goal in Charlie Murder is simple: punch, kick, stab, explode and set aflame anything that tries to get in your way. You can happily go about this on your own, or you can play it with up to three more people either locally or online (so for that you'll need Xbox Gold).

There are light role-playing elements that permeate nearly every facet of this game. You can choose from five different classes, each brings with it a unique personality and style of combat. As for the combat itself, if you like gruesome then this is a decent enough game. The story revolves around the apocalypse and a hunger for revenge. It follows the fallen band Charlie Murder and their journey to defeat their rival bang Gore Quaffer and their army of hell-spawned minions.

You alternate between roaming the streets, roaming inside of buildings or driving a car (whilst attempting to mow down as many of the un-dead as you possibly can), there are also some mini puzzles along the way, like making a club sandwich... There are a tonne of boss fights, sometimes too many, and whilst there are some you don't forget, like a giant hamburger zombie, there are plenty that you do forget about, they're just not that great.

Charlie Murder is a pretty ambitious game, as it tries to blend a side-scrolling brawler with features of RPGs and dungeon crawlers. That means there's lots of fighting, but you also get to see your character evolve over time. There's a bevy of skills to acquire - learned by receiving special tattoos - and even loot, which is always exciting, even if the limited inventory makes managing the loot a bit of a hassle.

What my husband and I found most annoying about this game was the crappy checkpoints. If you are doing multiplayer and die then another player can revive you, but if you both die it's game over and you restart. This for us was frustrating as we would start back up quite a while away from where we had gotten to and this cause us to give up on the game for a while.

The Final Word: Charlie Murder isn't perfect, but it does offer good enough game time, it's just not a game that I would play often, say, maybe once a year... :P