Interestingly, the first three Xbox Summer Fest demos I played were devoid of combat. Then this comes along with its pure, mindless violence. Paint The Town Red doesn’t bother with unimportant things like story, it prefers to jump straight into the action.
The object of the game: walk into a location (the one in the demo is a biker bar), start fight, then be the last person standing as you walk out, the building soaked with blood.
When you enter the biker bar, people are enjoying drinks, watching a band, playing pool and just going along their day. They pay no attention to you, so you can explore to check out weapons and pick where you want to start first. You can go for a tactical choice, or perhaps someone just looks annoying. Once you strike, mayhem breaks loose and everyone starts attacking each other, with some groups heading for you.
You have a basic attack, block, a powerful kick and a throw ability. Picking up weapons will make your basic attack stronger. Once you hit someone, they’ll fall to pieces – these Minecraft-like characters are fully modelled internally, chunks of their face will fly off to show the muscle and you can get right down to the bone.
As you fight, you’ll charge up abilities, such as a shockwave that knocks all nearby enemies flying. The game doesn’t explain the controls well initially (some of the buttons appear for a short time and disappear before you’ve read the list), but it’s all fairly simple.
The weapons seemed a bit too simple, however. The type of weapon would tear of flesh in different ways, but they all just felt like a stronger punch. Everything was swung around in the same way and it didn’t feel like much variery.
There are modifiers to mix things up, with weaker enemies, a zombie mode, a superhot mode, but ultimately it’s the same thing over and over. I kind of see where some would find appeal in this, but I don’t think it’s for me at all.
