With Halloween coming up, now’s a good time to practice your ghost busting skills with Extreme Exorcism. It’s an arcade action game for up to four players where you try and shoot ghosts who follow the same path you took on the last round! Extreme Exorcism is a downloadable title for Wii U, PS4, PS3, and Xbox One, but reviewed on Wii U here.

The game has a classic, 8-bit feel to it, thanks to the graphics and the fact that the action takes place on a single screen. In a way, it reminds me of other single screen action platformer games from the 80’s like Tumble Pop, Snow Bros., or Bubble Bobble. In fact, if Taito themselves made this game, I bet they would’ve called it Spooky Bobble.

Anyway, so you choose one of four characters (up to four can play at the same time). In each round, you’ll pick up weapons like swords and guns, and you must shoot ghosts. When you move to the next round, they’ll add a ghost on the screen, and it’ll follow the same path that you took the last round. When you shoot the ghost wearing a crown (the most recently added ghost who follows your path from the previous round), you’ll win and move onto the next round. If you can remember the path you took in the last round, you can kind of anticipate where the ghost will move. But be careful because if you have to shoot a lot and jump around a bunch, the ghost will do that, too, in the next round, so it may be harder to hit. The game is over when you get hit three times.

There are three modes of play in Extreme Exorcism. Arcade is the main mode. You’ll start out in a haunted house and must choose a room to play in. You’ll unlock new rooms and different weapons as you play. The goal is to survive as long as you can in the same room and get a high score. The game saves the highest score for each stage. Up to four can play at the same time in this mode, and friendly fire won’t hurt you. If you lose all your lives, the other players can resurrect you if they kill enough ghosts.

The next mode is Challenge and it is single player only. You are presented with a task like make it to a certain round or shoot a number of ghosts. When you reach the goal, you win the challenge. The last mode is Deathmatch. This is another mode for four players, but your goal is to shoot the other people, not the ghosts. When you win, you’ll get a ghost on your team in the next round. This may not seem fair, but I had pretty even matches every time I played this mode somehow, so I guess it works.

And that’s all there is to the game. If there was any problem I had with it, it’s that there isn’t much to it. It could’ve used some more modes, maybe, like a Story Mode where you can do more than one screen a session. But otherwise, I liked this game and appreciated the simplicity and arcade style gameplay. You don’t see many games like that anymore. If you enjoy single screen platform action games like Bubble Bobble, you should definitely check this one out.

Kid Factor:

Extreme Exorcism is rated E-10 with an ESRB descriptor of Fantasy Violence. You can shoot ghosts (and each other) with weapons like pistols, machine guns, and rocket launchers, but you just fall over when defeated. The 8-bit visuals keep the violence from becoming too graphic anyway. I’d be OK with any kid playing this. The game starts out easy and gets harder as you progress, so some kids may get frustrated with the later difficulty or bored with the simplicity of the game. Reading skill is helpful for some of the menus and text, but not necessary as the game is pretty easy to figure out by playing. And since up to four can play at the same time, it’s still a great Halloween family game.

Tags: Game Reviews