Tango Fiesta is Spilt Milk’s newest release, a top-down shooter exploding with references to action movies and fast-paced gunplay. With up to four-player co-op and six playable characters, Tango Fiesta may initially appear like a good purchase. Unfortunately, the prominence of bugs and a lack of replayability has this title fall short.
The game includes two game modes, both of which can be played with friends in local or online multiplayer. The pair consist of levels where completing objectives, such as destroying buildings and helicopters, leads to a stage boss that progresses you through an increasingly desperate struggle to survive the waves of goons, ghouls or enemy combatants.
Arcade is a free-play mode where the aim is to rack up as many points as possible, it starts of difficult straight out of the gate, getting increasingly challenging the further you progress. On the other hand, story mode follows the tale of John Strong, the greatest hero to ever exist, and how he was crushed and forgotten by Hollywood (almost as bad as Shia LaBeouf was).
One stand out from this release are the boss fights, which were distinct from the standard twin-stick action. With most enemies either spraying in your rough direction or running haphazardly at your gun, like it was their long-lost dad home from sea, the quality of even the first fight in the story mode caught me by surprise. Gordon Bennette (the aforementioned first boss) moves faster throughout his multiple phases, making what would be a below average encounter into a reasonably interesting five minutes of action.
As for unlockables, Tango Fiesta features the Gun Shop, where you can unlock up to 24 new weapons and throwables by defeating certain bosses, playing as different characters or getting a high enough score. The range of what you can unlock is pretty decent, with weapons ranging from rifles, to more cliché 80’s action fun with bazookas and Molotov cocktails. This adds some limited replayability to Tango Fiesta, but certainly doesn’t add up to hours of extra fun. These unlockables while nice aren’t sizable enough to give you much to aim for past getting high scores.
These positives would usually add up to a decent game that you and some friends could mess around with; sadly, Tango Fiesta shoots itself in the foot with clunky controls, occasional freezes and numerous bugs. While out of ammo, reloading your weapon results in your character’s direction becoming unchangeable alongside ammo pickups not registering. This can end an arcade run in frustrating fashion. For me this killed any motivation I had for playing. I personally can’t see myself spending thirty minutes grinding through arcade mode, only for it to screw me over, to put it plainly. Unless problems like these are fixed they’re going to be the primary reason not to touch this game. Why Tango Fiesta, a surprisingly simple game on consoles, isn’t polished on Xbox One is baffling.
Summary
This game has clearly had love put into it from the team, without the bugs and limited content I could easily see it being worth your time and money. Sadly, in its current state, you’re better off playing something else.
Connor is a games journalist, Staff Writer at VG247. They contributed 9 articles to ICXM in 2017, focused on game reviews, and Xbox news: now writes for VG247 (Gamer Network / IGN Entertainment), recognised in MCV 30Under30 2024.