Think back to each multiplayer game you have ever played. Let all those modes and lines wash over your brain as you journey back through your competitive gaming life. Suitably refreshed? Splendid. Right, now cast your mind back to all of the hardcore action games you have ever played. Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, Castlevania… all good. Now comes the hard part – attempt to imagine all of that nonsense happening concurrently. Your brain may begin to hurt at this point. Here is perfectly normal. Assuming you are not dead from Brainmelt, pat yourself at the back. You’ve just successfully imagined Anarchy Reigns. And yes, it’s each bit as stupid, chaotic, flawed and brilliant because it sounds.

Not that we might expect anything less from those clever chaps and chapettes at Platinum, mind. It is a team that revels inside the ridiculous and that either has no concept of normality or goes out of its method to avoid it. Or both. It’s kinda hard to inform. Still, even having experienced witches who turn their hair into giant demon animals to tear people apart and gung-ho powersuited crazies that use cigarettes to foil heat-seeking missiles, nothing – nothing – could prepare us for the silliness that gushes forth when the Anarchy Reigns floodgates swing open. Which, incidentally, only takes a question of seconds once you turn it on.

With the web space dominated by multiplayer shooters, Platinum’s latest wades into the fray and, ignoring all advice on the contrary, brings a twin-bladed chainsaw to a gunfight. It is a multiplayer shooter without (m)any guns, effectively – melee combat is the order of the day here and if you’ve played a Platinum game before, that you need to feel instantly at home with the commands and options. Weak and robust strikes will be mixed up, linked and delayed to supply attack strings of varying usefulness – these vary from character to character, so a spell in Practice mode is a must – while the B button permits you to grab and throw opponents or debris. Larger characters can use this to grapple several enemies quickly, that’s as satisfying because it is helpful in the course of a heated brawl.

Continuing Platinum’s campaign to offer the Left Trigger more love (it is the Fun Button in Revengeance, activating the awesome Blade Mode), here it grants access in your character’s Killer Weapon. Uses are rationed (albeit generously) and you may quickly see why – light versions can generally be chained and worked into combos for warm damage while the heavy ones pop out slow but trigger sensational murderations, perfect for annihilating stunned (or simply rubbish) opponents. Rounding off the offensive arsenal is the Rampage gauge, a rage meter that briefly turns you right into a flurry of fists in a position to pulverising foes in seconds. Clash with another Rampaging hero, though, and it will be the person who can mash hardest that comes out on top as hundreds of fists smash together, Asura’s Wrath style.

Defensive abilities are each piece as crucial, though. Guarding is the best of those, absorbing basic attacks but susceptible to leave you stunned must you attempt to block a Killer Weapon attack (in addition to making you a straightforward target for throw-happy players). The evade is much more useful with decent execution, dodging any forms of attack safely and able to putting in a punishing counterattack. With as much as 15 people attempting to punch you within the face at any given time, the few defensive options on offer are perhaps a very powerful to master.

The move set is classic Platinum, then, but once you’ve 16 players running around a sprawling arena, you will see why the team decided against any type of co-op play in Bayonetta. Locking an opponent right into a decent combo will also be hard enough on the better of times but if the horde smells blood and springs crashing in to attempt and steal your kill, you’d better be sitting on an exquisite damn good contingency plan. Free-for-all matches are an oddity, without delay the only showcase for Anarchy Reigns’ chaotic throwdowns and its most frustrating mode – there’s slightly an excessive amount of within the way of random elements to make it a correct test of skill and while good players will usually be rewarded with an honest finishing position, overall victory often feels left to chance. Or fate, if you’d rather.

This is basically due to crazy events that happen each match, a wealth of possible calamities and hazards released at random into the extent to make every battle unique. One moment you will be warned that Cthulhu is approaching (sadly, it seems to be a tremendous mechanical enemy and never the tentacle-faced Elder God). A higher, one player might be singled out as a fugitive, the complete population of the extent turning on them right away on the lookout for a handy guide a rough buck. Then, the whole map might change, tectonic plates shifting to change the layout entirely and throw everybody out in their usual patterns.

There aren’t that many unique special events but it is not loads the person gimmicks that make this brilliant – it is the insane combinations that arise. Tracked at the right hand side of the screen, sets of active effects build random deathmatch poker hand after random deathmatch poker hand – some you win and a few you lose. One match, a satellite laser strike might force everyone underground when you have a whole Rampage meter to show right into a full house of kills. However the next, you are forced to flee from the loads out for the bounty for your head while the stage is wracked by powerful mutants and debilitating viruses. It isn’t fair. But life’s not fair. Cope with it and, more importanly, enjoy it.

In solo modes, these dynamic modifiers can change everything. But in team-based modes, they’re way more balanced – allies can have your back should the bounty hunters come a-callin’, while entire enemy teams may be ended in polluted areas to be weakened by the sector before you slay the lot of them. While the anticipated array of Team Deathmatch and Capture The Flag variants are great fun, Team Battle is the clear highlight. After a brief spell of standard battle, players are promoted in response to their performance – top players on all sides are promoted to team leaders (with enhanced abilities, on the expense of being the assassination target for the alternative team), while runners-up become the leader’s powerful bodyguards. The weakest player on each team, meanwhile, takes at the medic role, a very important one but not one so reliant on obscenely quick reflexes. With roles changing every jiffy, poor leaders and overachieving medics soon be replaced and the team dynamic here’s awesome, especially, when the area starts changing the guidelines and battlegrounds at the fly.

Even modes that are supposed to by rights be gimmicky rubbish work surprisingly well here. Death Ball is de facto handball with a twist (the twist is death, in the event you hadn’t figured it out) but on a fine team, you can find yourselves slotting into familiar sporting roles, be it blocking the opposing team as they converge at the ball carrier or creating a run into space to choose up a sweet pass and stick one home. And the only-on-one duels, which will sometimes happen amid the bigger battles (for some unfathomable reason) are amazingly nearly traditional fighting games – feel any other player out with jabs and safe attacks while in quest of that crazy combo or fall back in your hard-hitting special moves and pay the value if and when they’re blocked or avoided.

Then there’s the small matter of selecting a personality. Several are pulled straight out of underrated monochrome Wii brawler MadWorld, though the varied cast offers all kinds of typical fighting game archetypes to select from. Will you plump for a heavy-hitting tank like Big Bull, an all-rounder like Jack or a nimble striker like Sasha? Outside of basic size and weight and the odd move set change, they do not really play all that differently and that is perfect – you’re able to pick a personality to fill a spot in a team and do it comfortable within the knowledge that no matter if you do not have every body in their combos memorised, you’ll still be capable to use all of them to no less than an inexpensive degree.

The multiplayer focus of the sport is obvious from as regards to everything it does, though solo players aren’t left wanting. Bot matches could be played on any mode and map, while a respectable-sized (if incredibly basic) single-player campaign offers how to unlock characters and extras without just ranking up online. For Platinum fans, this story-of-sorts mode is peppered with references and shout-outs to the studio’s other games – it’s as close as we’re prone to see to a suitable port of MadWorld, sadly, and actually, the awesome Greg Proops commentary from the Wii game can be a really perfect fit for this type of game, certainly more so than the unusual soundtrack Platinum has elected to run with. Challenges, meanwhile, will keep leaderboard glory-seekers happy but even at this budget price point, solo silliness can only really be seen as an appetiser for the foremost course – online play.

A multiplayer-focused brawler shouldn’t work, but it surely does. And given the inexpensive-as-chips RRP, you’ll likely have the capacity to pick up Anarchy Reigns for the cost of an XBLA game before too long. On that basis alone, anyone searching for something just a little different from a competitive online experience would do well to offer this a go – you’ll never play the rest prefer it, that’s needless to say.

Score: 8/10