Riddled Corpses EX review for PS Vita, PS4, Xbox One

Don’t be fooled by the fact that Riddled Corpses EX’s art looks like this. Despite the fact the game is on the Vita (as well as PS4 and Xbox One), it’s not yet another Japanese game starring barely pubescent high school girls who get put in all kinds of lewd and compromising positions.

In fact, it’s almost the opposite: Riddled Corpses EX is a retro-looking top-down, twin-stick shooter, with barely any story to speak of beyond your standard “survivors battling monsters in a post-apocalyptic landscape.” It’s entirely possible, I guess, that the characters really are barely pubescent high school girls, but they’re so pixelated that I assume you’d really need to squint and use your imagination to tell.

That doesn’t mean that Riddled Corpses EX is actually any good. Nor, for that matter, does it mean it’s terrible. It’s just something worth noting, since I took one look at the game’s icon on my homescreen and immediately — and wrongly — assumed the worst.

Once you get past that, you’ll discover that this game is pretty much the definition of serviceable — it does what it’s supposed to do, nothing more, nothing less. You run around the screen blasting away at enemies and your environment, you pick up gold for upgrades, and you grind your way up to higher and higher levels.

Mind you, in some ways, being so generic is actually kind of an achievement. Riddled Corpses EX throws a lot of enemies at you right from the get-go, to the point that your screen is almost always filled with them from top to bottom. Somehow, though, you never have to deal with any slowdown — they just keep on coming at you, and you just keep on bobbing and weaving around the screen, and you never have to factor in delays between you pushing a thumbstick and the corresponding action happening on screen.

To be sure, “not crashing” is a pretty low bar to clear. But, at the same time, all things considered it’s still an accomplishment. Riddled Corpses EX isn’t going to astound you, but it’s also not going to disappoint you too much if you just want to shoot some monsters. It may not be sophisticated, but it works.

COWCAT provided us with a Riddled Corpses EX PS Vita code for review purposes.