Yes ok I know I shortened the title but sorry the full name is ridiculously long….anyway on with the review. Back in May Penny Arcade was ported over to XBLA and was an instant hit. If you don’t know about Penny Arcade it was originally from a website that made fun of video games, it had a wacky story with some great combat and ridiculous dialogue. After the first one was released the developers promised a saga of episodes and thankfully they haven’t made us wait too long for this latest installment.

Players returning from the first episode get to keep all their stats in part two, if you are new to the series you can still create a new character but you may miss out on some of the jokes from EP 1. Episode 2 is like all great sequels, it takes the best parts of the first game and builds on them, the turn based combat system is well balanced and  will get you hooked  and the weird humor will keep you laughing throughout.  There are two characters to choose from and each has 3 moves including a special attack. The special attacks are performed via mini games and are pretty fun but can get repetitive. You get experience points for your character but sadly there are no skills or perks to unlock, I’m guessing the developers wanted to keep things simple as it’s just an arcade game but I would have liked at least some skills to build on.

Some people may be turned off by this game if they aren’t RPG fans or think that they need to have followed the web comic to enjoy the game. This couldn’t be any further from the truth, anyone can pick this game up and enjoy it and downloadable RPGs on Live Arcade are pretty rare. Ok the price isn’t cheap pout it’s a polished product and if you are prepared to pay 800 points for a basic port of some early 80’s game then you should be prepared to pay 1200 for a quality game like this.