Coffin Dodgers

For some reason I found myself looking at the amount of games I’ve played which, before starting Coffin Dodgers, was sitting at 392. I decided to do a thing called a Bean Dive which is where you earn one achievement in as many different games as you want to reduce your completion percentage. I started 8 games to get myself up to 400 games played. This reduced my completion percentage by 2.5% and added 300 achievements to my to do list. Coffin Dodgers was the quickest and easiest of the games selected so I dived right in to correcting my completion position.

Coffin Dodgers is essentially an arcade racer and a poor man’s Mario Kart. You play as a selection of old guys in a race for your lives against the Grim Reaper. The races take place in a tournament fashion where the person who finishes last dies. And then comes back as a zombie otherwise there wouldn’t be any competitors and two-man races are boring.

I think there was some kind of over-arching story which involves the Grim Reaper wanting to tear down the retirement home for some evil guy to build something in it’s place but it’s an arcade racer – there isn’t much point to a story line.

Now, the gameplay is a bit shit if I’m honest. As I said, it’s like Mario Kart in that you drive around a circuit collecting boxes with power-ups in and you have to use them on your opponents to hurt them or speed yourself up. There is also a car upgrade function and this was a bit stupid because if you don’t make the right upgrades you will find yourself at a massive disadvantage. You also can’t replay previous races to earn additional credits so if you do make an error, you will have to start again. You do keep your upgrades though and it’s a short game so it’s not the end of the world but still it’s mildly frustrating.

There is also a function that allows you to melee your opponents with your walking stick but this is something that turns out to be really easy for the AI and really difficult for the player so it gives the computer a massively unfair advantage.

Looks wise, it’s not winning any awards but it does what it’s supposed to do for the most part. There were a few times I got stuck on scenery though which is almost unforgivable in such a short game with minimal content. Musically it can do one – it’s terribly annoying.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

Achievements wise, it’s a relatively quick one that can be done in less than 4 hours despite only one achievement being guaranteed on a single playthrough of the game. Upon completing the game, you unlock the Grim Reaper as a playable character and there is another achievement for completing his storyline.

You also need to win every race in the game. You have to win the last one to complete the game but the others, you just need to not die so you can finish in any position as long as you’re not in a death position at the end of the mini-tournament. You get 5 achievements for getting golds in all races in the individual tournaments and another for just winning a race.

There are also achievements associated with the power-ups where you have to successfully use them a certain amount of times. The only one of these that posed an issue was the uzi but in all honesty, most of the weapons are shit and won’t help you at all. Most of these achievements can be grinded in a two player race without AI if they don’t come through normal progress in story mode.

There is also a strange achievement for picking up one item in Crazy Granddad mode which seems to be a multiplayer, pick up as many items as you can, mode. I didn’t play this properly though, just got the item and left the game.

The final achievement I unlocked was for fully upgrading the kart and there are three achievements associated with the upgrading aspect. You can’t do this within the two playthroughs required for the rest of the achievements though so some replaying the story mode (from the beginning) is required to get this one.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Coffin Dodgers is not the best game but it does have some charm and doesn’t hang around long enough to outstay its welcome. That said for the content, it’s not worth the current £9.59 price tag and if you are going to play it, I would recommend waiting for a sale.