The popularity of the Twisted Metal series in the late 90s spurred developers into coming up with their own brand of explosive car-combat mayhem. The Luxoflux-developed Vigilante 8, released on the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 in 1998, managed to make quite a splash and crafted a solid fan base that still fondly remembers the game. It is with this legacy tucked firmly in its belt that Isopod Labs, made up of several original team members from Luxoflux, has released a remake of the original Vigilante 8 on Xbox Live Arcade.

V8 seems to be feature-loaded on paper, but these features are slightly less impressive when played. The main single player mode is called Quest, and it’s nothing more than a set of 3 bot-matches for you to take on with each character. After beating all of a character’s challenges, you will face a boss and unlock a bonus item if you win. The characters do have backstories, but these are told through lazily written text on the character select screen. Each character does feel and play differently, but instead of making each character fun to play for their own unique reasons, this instead makes some characters more annoying to utilize.

The gameplay of Vigilante 8: Arcade revolves around the simple concept of vehicular deathmatches. You choose from one of 8 stylish characters -- each with their own strengths, weakness, and special abilities -- and are thrown into one of 5 creative arenas where you are tasked with taking out every other vehicle that is moving. You start with only one ranged attack: a weak machine gun with unlimited ammo that overheats easily. You can also damage and attempt to flip enemy vehicles by slamming into them as hard as you can, which can lead to some very fun moments.

To gain new weapons and defensive items, you must drive around and run into the pick-up icons littered throughout the map. The pick-up weapons include lock-on missiles, shotgun-like burst blasts, and a laser attack that reigns down from the sky. You have 3 empty slots at your disposal for pick-up weapons, one assigned to each of the X, Y, and B buttons. Each weapon that you grab mid-battle gets auto-assigned to one of these slots. Each car also has a unique special attack that can also be picked up to take one of your slots, and these attacks include a sound wave that sends cars flying and a mini-tornado that whips assailants away from your car as you speed by.

The effectiveness of these attacks varies wildly, but they are added upon by the main twist on the standard car-combat formula that V8 brings to the table: the ability to charge your attacks. Instead of pressing one of your three attack buttons, holding the button down charges a meter in your weapons HUD. Each weapon has 3 levels of attack, and you choose which variation of the attack you wish to fire by releasing the button when the meter lines up to the level of power that you want. This innovation adds a lot of strategy, and some much needed variety to the otherwise limited number of attacks.

8: Arcade has a quirky ‘70s vibe to it, from the menus and music to the character designs, and it works well to differentiate this from all of the other car-combat titles. While a good idea, this vibe doesn’t lend itself to good in-game graphics. While a marked improvement over the original titles, the visuals in Vigilante 8: Arcade leaves a lot to be desired. The game runs somewhere near the 60fps benchmark, but the framerate constantly dips as any on-screen action is taking place, and has even dropped to the high teens during a few particularly explosive moments of my playing time. Another problem with the visuals is that the weapon effects are downright lazy in execution. The game represents your attacks with bright blobs of color highlighting the missiles and bullets that go flying. While this makes the attacks easier to see during battle, it also looks amateurish and takes away any of the visual impact that these weapons should have on the player when they are incoming. The sound is equally mediocre, offering a handful of generic tunes that are disco-ish in nature and some functional yet plain sound effects. The character voices are entertaining but are only heard on menus and after matches.

There are 5 maps in V8: Arcade, and their design might be the high point in the title. You get to brawl through a farm, a crashed meteor site, an oil-field, a ski mountain, and the Hoover Dam. While the levels are not too interesting visually, the abundance of destructible objects as well as some funny hidden bonuses -- like the ability to cause an avalanche or ride the ski lift in the mountain level -- add some unpredictability to the otherwise staid gameplay.