Rick Ajax is a comic-book tough guy who is constantly forced to fight for the entertainment of readers at the whim of his creator, the Maker. He's pretty sick and tired of it, and if you play Unbound Saga, you'll understand why. Originally released on the PSP last year, this shallow and tiresome fighting game has now made its way onto Xbox Live, giving you a great opportunity to ignore it all over again.

In Unbound Saga, you have the interminable task of guiding the lumbering Rick through 10 stages of boring, mindless, side-scrolling beat-'em-up combat as he journeys to give the Maker a piece of his mind and break free of his pencil-and-ink chains. Eventually, Rick is joined by former professional damsel-in-distress Lori Machete whom he suspects of being tossed into his life as part of a crossover with another comic book. This core concept of self-aware comic-book heroes has potential, but Unbound Saga doesn't do anything interesting with it. The story is unfocused and features characters that appear and disappear for no apparent reason, as well as levels that end abruptly without any sense of pacing or climax. The action ostensibly takes place on the pages of a comic book; you progress from one panel to the next and, when the camera pulls way out, you can see the edges of surrounding panels. But the visuals only make a halfhearted attempt to sell this concept; there's never any expository text at the top of a panel, and speech bubbles appear only alongside pop-up character portraits.
As Rick, you can kick and punch your enemies into submission, as well as whack them with items you pick up, such as bottles and benches. However, Rick is so slow and his enemies so stupid that there's no enjoyment to be gleaned from any of this combat. Once Lori shows up, you can switch between the two characters at any time. She's faster and more agile than Rick, but the action is so fundamentally weak that it isn't much more enjoyable to play as Lori. Often, just when you think you've finished a panel and are ready to move one merciful step closer to completion, the Maker's hand will pop into the frame and quickly sketch a new group of mindless thugs for you to clobber. So, by the time you reach the end of this excruciating journey, you'll be longing to clobber the Maker yourself for putting you through this tedium. Unfortunately, the final confrontation is as anticlimactic and unsatisfying as everything else about Unbound Saga. Along the way, you'll be confronted by punks, werewolves, hobos, and commandos, but despite the differences in their outward appearances, there's no real variety to the way your enemies fight. Lori actually refers to the constant stream of goons and thugs as the "Mindless Ones," and they sure do live up to their name. Even bosses are only differentiated from the other fist fodder by an energy bar at the bottom of the screen.
Fighting is a drag; it looks clumsy and feels clunky. And in addition to being simple and repetitive, the brawling lacks any sense of impact. Despite the visual representation of such big comic-book sound effects as WHAM, BLAM, and SMACK every time you hit an enemy, nothing about your attacks feels hard hitting or satisfying. As you progress, you earn skill points that let you unlock new combos and abilities for Rick and Lori, but the addition of a few new moves to your repertoire isn't nearly enough to make this clunky combat compelling. Unbound Saga tries to give you an incentive to play through the campaign multiple times by letting you carry over moves you've unlocked from one game to the next, but it's hard to imagine feeling compelled to finish the game even once.
The visuals in Unbound Saga are ordinary and inconsistent. Some of the background environments are interesting, especially those in the dingy, run-down city of Toxopolis, but the character models and objects in the foreground lack the detail to match and look out of place as a result. The cutscenes are the game's high point and feature gorgeous comic-book artwork. The voice actors do a fine job, but otherwise, the sound is disappointing. The harsh, grating music might suit the ruined urban landscape of Toxopolis, but it repeats too often, and the sounds of combat lack the necessary oomph to match the comic-book onomatopoeias onscreen.
This release of Unbound Saga adds local and online multiplayer, but while sharing the experience with a friend makes the drudgery a bit more tolerable, it doesn't make it fun. No matter what you're looking for, there's a game available on XBLA that does it much better than Unbound Saga. Comic Jumper makes much smarter, funnier use of a comic-book setting, and such hard-hitting classics as Final Fight and Streets of Rage 2 have satisfying combat and enemies that attack with variety and personality. Unbound Saga isn't in the same league. With these much better games and more like them readily available for download, there's no reason for anyone to waste time with this boring brawler.

Whether built piece by piece in a mad scientist's lab, awoken from a long slumber by nuclear blasts, or invading from another world, giant monsters have been a cinema staple for generations. Starting with Rampage in the mid-'80s, games have sometimes strove to put players inside the massive skins (or rubber suits) of these tremendous terrors to experience the destructive thrill of laying waste to cities with their own bare claws. Eat Them is the latest game to try to make you feel like one of these massive monsters, and there is satisfaction to be found in wielding the power to destroy buildings with all the effort it might take a child to destroy a sandcastle. But this simple pleasure soon gives way to frustration as you're forced to complete objectives that distract from the joys of destruction. Furthermore, the efforts of puny humans trying to put an end to you become so effective as to make your monster seem like a fragile creature rather than a powerful monstrosity.

There's the slightest hint of a story about a mad scientist using his monstrous creations to do things like rob banks and build up an army of henchmen, but the game wastes very little time on it, which is just as well. No giant monster ever stopped to ask itself, "What's my motivation?" Eat Them gives you an isometric view of your giant monster and its immediate surroundings, and it sets you loose in an enclosed urban environment where you're free to run, jump, punch, kick, and stomp with abandon. Like so many games of late, Eat Them's visuals take inspiration from comics, and the vibrant colors and sharp, clean lines give the action a pulpy comic book vibe. The buildings, parks, and walkways are bright and enticing, which makes destroying them all the more enjoyable, and it's empowering to see the effects of all your rampaging. Fragments of buildings fly from your attacks like so many little pieces of cardboard, and the interiors of structures erupt in flames.
The controls feel appropriately lumbering and imprecise; your monster indiscriminately and gracelessly punches buildings and stomps down city streets without regard for the trees or small structures in its path. But as much as this lack of precision feels right given the size of the monster you're controlling, it sometimes gets in the way of gameplay. You might want to pick up that police car and hurl it at the nearest building, for instance, but your monster may grab a nearby person instead. This imprecision can become a serious issue when you're on the brink of death and need to pick up a cluster of pedestrians to replenish your health but can't quite make your monster grab them.
Once you do have a person or five in your scaly handlike appendage, your monster automatically stuffs those tasty humans into its maw and reaps the nutritional benefits. Replenishing health is a constant concern in Eat Them. Massive monsters have metabolisms like you wouldn't believe, and as a result, your creature's health steadily declines, even in those rare moments when it's not being assaulted by people. Of course, the city's inhabitants don't take kindly to your visit to their home. Crushing city blocks into smithereens would be less satisfying without also being able to crush some puny humans making laughable efforts to stop you. And it is enjoyable to grab the occasional mouthful of delicious police officers or soldiers and chomp down on them. But the efforts of these humans soon start to seriously cramp your style. As you reduce more and more of the city to rubble, the humans bring out soldiers with rocket launchers, tanks, mechanized battle suits, and other weaponry capable of taking down a towering monster. These amassed fighting forces can drain away your health so rapidly that you need to focus your efforts on eating people almost constantly just to stay alive, leaving little time for the more enjoyable business of destroying things.

The Maximum Destruction levels are the best, setting you free in the city with nothing to do but level as much of it as you can within a given amount of time. Destruction levels differ in that they require you to destroy specific targets before time runs out. Sadly, many levels require you to focus on doing something other than smashing stuff to bits. Race missions have you run from checkpoint to checkpoint and flip the core mechanic around by requiring you to keep the damage you leave in your wake below a certain amount. It's an interesting attempt to turn the way you play the game upside down, but this task turns out to be more frustrating than enjoyable. Waypoints hover around the very edge of the screen to guide you to the next checkpoint, but it's easy to lose sight of these small indicators amidst the chaos. There's some fun to be had in leaping onto rooftops and hustling down the streets, but it's impossible to avoid leaving a fair amount of damage in your wake as you try not to needlessly step on fragile buildings or cause other wanton destruction, so you're sure to earn the attention of the armed forces. The attacks of humans can start to feel unfair here because you don't have the option of stopping much to fight them off if you want to earn a gold medal, but at a certain point, you can't just ignore them, either.
In each of these level types, you have unlimited monsters, but losing a monster incurs a significant time penalty. The Survival levels are the exception. Here, your goal is simply to keep a single monster alive for as long as possible. It's easy--and dull--to survive for long stretches of time by lurking in a corner of the playing field and just running to the next empty corner when the armed forces start bearing down on your location. You also need to complete the occasional story mission, each of which has a specific objective, though most of these end up feeling pretty similar. For instance, in one, you need to smash a prison and then make sure the escaping prisoners are not captured by the police; in another, you need to make sure that the members of a protesting pro-monster-rights group aren't arrested.

Protecting these escaped criminals and monster-loving protesters is irritating because the controls don't let you precisely target any police or soldiers who impede them. In later story stages, the armed forces come at you with such force that escorting your flock to safety before time runs out becomes maddeningly difficult. And because you need to complete each mission in one group before you can move on to the next, you can't just avoid the types of missions that aren't to your liking. You may well find yourself stuck, needing to repeat one mission over and over again until you finally manage to pass it and can advance through the story or until you just give up in frustration.
There are four premade monsters to choose from, but you can also mix and match heads, arms, bodies, legs and backpacks that can fire mortar, rockets, or other tools of destruction to devise your own horrific creation. You unlock new parts for earning silver or gold medals on missions, and gaining access to gruesome new insect heads, deadly mechanical claw arms, and bizarre three-legged lower bodies is a cool reward for your destructive efforts. There's local multiplayer that lets up to four monsters team up to lay waste to the city or tackle other missions, and the simple pleasures of destruction are every bit as enjoyable when shared with friends. Nevertheless, you still need to contend with the same frustrating objectives and stiff difficulty issues you encounter when playing alone. Eat Them offers moments of destructive glee, but too often, it just doesn't put its best tentacle forward.