PLATFORM: PC, PS4/5, SWITCH, XBOX ONE/SERIES (REVIEWED) | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Ever fancied running your very own launderette? In Arcade Paradise, that’s your initial occupation – looking after King Wash, the place set up by your very own dad, while he’s away on business. You’ll be loading and unloading washing machines and dryers, picking up litter, pulling wads of gum from various surfaces and occasionally thrusting a plunger into a very grimy toilet. It’s not the most exciting or glamorous pastime, but a leftover arcade machine gives you an idea – why not use the money you earn from your daily chores to buy some more machines and turn the place into a full-on arcade? Your dad Gerald – voiced by Doug Cockle from The Witcher – might not be too happy about it, and he’ll happily voice his displeasure by telephone from his current base on the Riviera (get the joke there?), but your sister lends more than a few helping hands to get your new venture up and running. It’s not all plain sailing, but the effort is definitely worth it.
During the opening few hours of the game, most of your time is spent on the laundry side of things as you build up enough funds to buy new arcade cabinets and increase the amount of space available inside the building. It can get very laborious and really quite tedious, and you’re rarely given enough time to actually try out any of the cabinets you buy, but power through those first couple of weeks and things eventually start to run a bit more smoothly.
Each of the 30+ cabinets that you’ll amass throughout the game is fully playable, and they all have their own list of goals to accomplish. Meeting these objectives will increase the machine’s popularity, bringing in more customers and increasing your bank balance even further, and other factors like the position of the cabinets, how long you spend playing them and the overall cleanliness of the arcade all have an additional effect on how popular each machine is. Daily “to do” lists give you three additional objectives that reward you with separate currency that can be spent on upgrades which, amongst other things, allow you to stop cabinets breaking down so often, collect money automatically and, most importantly, spend more time playing games rather than doing laundry.
The games themselves are either riffs on or direct clones of well known arcade games. Barkanoid is the classic block-breaker Arkanoid with a dog instead of a standard paddle, Racer Chaser is a cops and robbers-themed isometric Pac-Man with a slight twist, and Bomb Dudes stands in for Bomberman. Arcade staples like Pong, pool, darts and table hockey make appearances too, alongside plenty of other surprises. With so many games on offer, some of them are of course much more (or, indeed, less) enjoyable than others, but spending time playing all of them is the only surefire way to hit those all-important goals and boost each cabinet’s popularity to a decent level.
The management side of things is fairly light, limited to carrying out a handful of repetitive tasks and changing a few settings to maximise your earnings. Many of the arcade games themselves are very addictive, and getting to see the fruits of your labours – more space, more machines and more money – is always rewarding. A few pesky bugs do take the enjoyment levels down a bit though – some goals will lose progress or reset themselves for seemingly no reason, making objectives impossible to complete. Also ,the controls can sometimes be terribly loose, as can the game’s interpretation of some of the rules, and the camera has a habit of locking into some very strange angles. If things can be polished up a bit, definitely add an extra star to the rating!
