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It's the middle of the afternoon and I've already fired a rocket launcher at a police officer, used a pizza box to block a hail of bullets and killed a man with a fire extinguisher (without even turning the thing on). During a lull in the fighting there's a muffled explosion above me somewhere and as debris rains down I try to grab anything that would work as an improvised weapon. It takes me a few seconds to realise why I can't pick up the item that fell at my feet: it used to be somebody's limb. Technically, I suppose it still is their limb, but the current state of things means I'm going to struggle to reunite it with its original owner and I'm not really sure what use they can make of it now. It quickly becomes irrelevant and after canvassing my environment I decide I'd be better off taking a frying pan and finding something (someone) I can swing it at.This is how the middle of your afternoon looks if you're playing The Showdown Effect, anyway. Arrowhead Studios' second effort is a twitch-fast deathmatch platformer inspired by the likes of Super Smash Bros. and as riddled with action clichés as it is with bullets. Furthermore, it's as off-the-wall as you'd expect from a development team whose first game featured wizards with machineguns: Magicka was both inventive and irreverent, and Arrowhead's alchemy mixed a build-your-own system of spellcasting with tongue-in-cheek humour, selling over a million copies of the base game and some four million expansions to go with it.
It was also broken, as Dan Griliopoulos explained in his review, and though subsequent patches did much to address this, the memory of it's imperfect release remains fresh in Arrowhead's collective consciousness. This is not something they want to see repeated with The Showdown Effect, and lead designer Johan Pilestedt explains that getting the very best from their multiplayer melee demands thorough testing, something they say that publisher Paradox will guarantee this time around and, indeed, have to.
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