Four combatants enter one leaves (or two, depending on the choice of mode). That about sums up Moribund, a local multiplayer title that pits up to four soon-to-be-dismembered friends in gruesome battles to the death. Couch carnage at its finest, environmental hazards and power-ups ensuring there’s rarely a moment where you’re truly… safe.
Aim, stun, charge up your harpoon, fire, and grin mischievously as body parts fly in all directions. Nothing too complicated about that. Although… throw in the aforementioned hazards – which range from classics like explosive barrels and unstable ice blocks to crazier things like, say, plasma guns – and suddenly, the fight gets a lot more challenging. Or staying alive, rather, as taking out everyone else is a tricky affair while you’re busy being sliced by whirling blades or caught by a closing door. In these wicked arenas, death is truly but a single bad decision away.
You are 4 friends. On a couch. You have 4 controllers. All you need is a post-apocalyptic excuse to duke it out.
Should you ever feel like taking on a challenge more suited to a lone wolf, there are always the fifteen single-player challenges, and from what I’ve seen, these are not to be taken lightly; just like your opponents, across Moribund’s eighty(!) arenas. On a related note, the omission of bots is a tad puzzling, given the title’s local-only nature. It does come with a ‘challenge mode’, but that’s a far cry from being able to take on AI-controlled opponents for those times when you’ve either had enough of dismembering your friends or, well, them doing it to you. Yeah. Like that’ll ever happen.
Moribund is available from Steam, carrying a $9.99 price tag.