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Vigilante 8: Arcade is a brand new re-imagining of the original themes and gameplay, engineered from the ground up for today’s hardware by the original founders of Luxoflux and V8 developers. Players will rediscover the joys of weapon-based off-road car mayhem on five newly-designed, highly interactive arenas that players can demolish in eight highly varied ’70s vehicles. In addition to local split-screen mode, multiple players will be able take their car-crushing skills online, competing and/or teaming up with other V8 players the world over!

Genre: Action

Publisher: Activision

Developer/Co-Developer: Isopod Labs / Luxoflux Corp.

Online Play: 8 Versus

Local Play: 4 Versus

November 5, 2008 –
Back in the heyday of the PlayStation, one of the most prominent genres was known as vehicular combat. The premise of these games was very simple. Players select a vehicle of some non-descript make and model, each with varying special weapons and driving attributes, then take to the field of battle in an effort to destroy other cars on the map. Very simple stuff. Vigilante 8 was one of the many series to take advantage of the genre’s popularity and launched to critical acclaim in 1998. It spawned one sequel and the series spanned across several different platforms before it died with the genre that it called home just a handful of years later.

Now Activision is bringing Vigilante 8 back with Vigilante 8: Arcade, an Xbox Live Arcade title selling for 800 Microsoft Points. You get a combination of eight characters from the two games in the V8 series and five arenas that have seen a bit of refinement since their time in the late ’90s. The gameplay is identical to what you remember and that’s both good and bad. It’s good because of the nostalgia factor of being able to run through such a classic experience. The vehicle combat is less exciting than I remember as I found most of my battles devolving into me reversing away from the competition and lobbing mortars and firing rockets into their front bumpers.

Incoming mortar! And it’s purple!


The controls are also straight out of the original which is to say that they’re floaty. Tapping right or left on the analog stick sends your careening in either direction. Some vehicles are worse than others but they’re all pretty manageable. What can get annoying is when you’re playing as some of the bigger vehicles and the tiniest mine knocks your car over. Thankfully you have some control when on your back so righting yourself isn’t much of a worry, but those few seconds when your underbelly is exposed can mean certain death.

Each of the eight vehicles has its own Quest mode where you’ll play through three arenas, each with a growing number of enemies as you move on. The requisite final boss also appears at the end of the final stage, and it’s different depending on which character you are. One notable change that has been made from original comes in the form of salvage. As you play through the Quest each opponent that you total will drop salvage for you to collect. Picking up these scrap parts actually extends the amount of hit points for your character. It’s a nice mechanic and you can also put together weapon combos to earn extra salvage. There are also oddly placed alien artifacts that can be collected, but these felt like a worthless add-on to me.

The overall design of the Quest is pretty mundane with little differentiating the characters besides the end boss, and it’s a bummer that you never see a full roster of seven other drivers while in Quest mode (for that you’ll have to do a custom battle). Instead the max you’ll see is three, plus the end boss.

For as fun as the single-player can be, the real Vigilante 8 experience is found in the multiplayer where you can pit up to eight players on Xbox Live against each other in a battle royale. You can play deathmatch or with teams and it’s a much better experience than playing against the AI. I had an issue finding competition on Xbox Live, but once I was able to populate a match the gameplay was quite fun. Lag wasn’t an issue and the framerate, while never solid, wasn’t made worse by multiplayer. It’s also important to note that up to four players can also play on one console against AI bots in the split-screen mode.

Epic battle between bus and dune buggy.


The stages themselves have been fitted with many more destructible buildings and environmental pieces. You can run over oil derricks and create a spout of oil that can carry other cars into the air or destroy a ski lodge in the snow level. The destruction is visually impressive and you can also create traps for your enemies, but that all comes at a technical toll.

The framerate in Vigilante 8 stutters all too often when the camera swings to reveal a large chunk of the level and the action going on therein. That’s not to say that Vigilante 8: Arcade is a bad looking XBLA game; it’s actually quite the opposite, but the stuttering frames are disheartening and jarring to the gameplay experience. That having been said, edges are smooth, texture work is solid and the models are a bit more detailed than you’ll remember.

Sound in Vigilante 8: Arcade, like the flavor of the game itself, is ripped straight from the ’70s. It’s a little repetitive, but it’s still fun to jam to old school tunes while blasting missiles into the side of an Astro Van. Sound effects don’t pack quite the punch but they should, but this is an XBLA game, after all.

Closing Comments
Vigilante 8: Arcade is one of those titles that simply isn