You have completely cheated Death, and Spanked him into submissio
This is one of the most integral places in the new XBLA title DeathSpank. The 3/4 top-down-perspective-action-adventure-hack-and-slash-roleplaying game, from the mind of Ron Gilbert, is true and true Diablo meets Monkey Island. The characters are olde fantasy to a t, and the action is nothing but loot based.
A little backstory coming atcha! You play as DeathSpank, the titular character, a "Dispenser of Justice," and basically a vagabond hero. You want nothing but to protect the innocent, dispense justice, vanquish evil, and to get the all powerful Artifact. As your journey of vanquishing evil progress you are ambushed by a pack of Orques, after receiving The Artifact, and stripped clean and sparse from the loot you have acquired up to this point, but that doesnt matter. It doesnt because as soon as you get back on your feet, you meet some of the world's npcs, as specifically DeathSpank addresses one as Non-Player Character, and he in reply as Protagonist.
The random villagers that light up and have names are nothing but quest spawners, and provide some of the light-hearted comedy DeathSpank provides. And with the quests provided, you get to traverse the world in which DeathSpank protects, or doesnt in some cases. I rarely found the quests that hard to get through, since they provide hints in the form of the Quest Log and Fortune Cookies, except one particular one around the end of the game. A Wretched Villager wants to complete his dinner by getting one of the most dangerous creatures as his meal, and of course the quest is named, "Leer a Sabretooth Donkey to the Wretched," but by this time in the game I had blown through the quests with minimal reading or use of the cookies. I go to the field where the Donkeys spawn, kill the first one, go further out, into a nearby cave, and kill the rest, and nothing. No item drop, no note, no nothing. I did this about 5 or 6 times after respawning in different locations to get the creatures back and still same effect. 30 minutes of gameplay rooned by my haphazardly play style. Of course, this isnt entirely my fault, with this type of game, hacking and slashing only gets you so far.
The game is, in my opinion, solely a single player game, but it has a drop-in-drop-out multiplayer mode, where a second player has to do nothing bu press start on the other controller and they are Sparkles, DeathSpank's wizard sidekick. Sparkles has his array of supporting attacks, as read distractions, and nothing but healing effects in a pinch. I never played much with Sparkles, because my brother hasn't been too enthralled by DeathSpank, but dont get too discouraged, I'm sure its an OK addition to this game.
On to the part of the game I really liked! As seen in the pictures I have provided, you can adjust your equipment as you choose fit, or as the game states, "Always wear best armor." If that is selected it takes away the creative aspect of the mix and match armor and trinkets. You will find these, along with weapons, as drops, in chests, or as quest rewards, like another game based in console-based hack-and-slasher Diablo. The weapons are another part of the game where it hits you with the either funny, ironic, satirical, or just ridiculous. There is a weapon where you shoot free range chickens and a sword with spikes, a ball mace head, and other random items attached to it, for Christ's sake! It mixes it up a little bit with how you can use the weapons, as in you can map each weapon to 1 of the 8 face buttons, along with health items, or magic orbs.
All in all I really liked this game. It had the humor I loved from Monkey Island, the storyline that was shallow but intriguing, and you get to kill "Stoopid Chickens." I like the hack-and-slash aspect, I love the item management, the characters, enemies, items, all that stuff! This was my first game I have ever gotten all achievements on and received my first S rank with. I just wish that they had something more like this in it.
How cool would it have been to beat the shit out of pirates with the Super Slashing Sword of Spinning, in the lvl 20 Dragon Slayer armor set?!
