Good presentation, decent battles, but crippled with the usage of starforce copy protection.
Anyway, Sudeki is a decent console port, with beautifully done environments and fairly good exaggerated animations. No realism here, it's all fantasy, and it works. The story is quite decently done despite all the cliches, what can I say? Reviewers who slam the story yet give mindless shooting games high scores are hypocrites. Just because you didn't like something means that it was bad. Same with Sudeki; just because you didn't like the been-there, done-that feeling it gives you, is no reason to overlook the presentation. It's a polished product, you have to give it that.
You run around the world from place to place advancing the story, and battles occur when you enter areas designated as battle areas. Here combat occurs in real-time, where you control one character from a possible of 4 - the others will be controlled by the AI, and for the most part are okay. Two characters use 3rd person view and execute melee attacks which consist mostly of combos and special attacks, while the other two use ranged weapons and are played in a 1st person view. The camera for the most part is okay but can get flaky on occasion.
Saving is still done at save points like on the console, which is really annoying. The game is a console port after all, but these old conventions don't really help. Frankly this is a holdover from the days when storage was tiny and every byte counted. There's no reason why saving should be like this anymore except out of habit, and for an artificial challenge - "it's not hard because it is, but because you have to walk all the way from the save point" kind of challenge. And that's quite blah.
The game isn't too hard, and if you grind for money to get the upgrades and buy every new item in the shops (doesn't take that long), it can be quite fun once you have enough equipment to make fights easy. The moves are nice to pull off and the shooting okay, although it gets repetitive after a while. Still, it never actually descended into tedium, although the battle areas could not be skipped and this can be a problem when all you want is to quickly get to an area at the other end of the map - there's quite a bit of criss-crossing going on in the game.
Sound and music were presentable, although nothing impressive. Standard fantasy fare for the most part, which isn't always a good thing - this may be forgiveable if you're an indie developer working out of a basement, but with a decent budget there's no reason sound effects to be drab and sparse.
Unfortunately the game uses starforce as copy protection, which, although easily circumvented by unethical people, force a lot of unnecessary hardship on legitimate customers. Just for that alone I have to axe my Tilt and Value scores. Sorry, no exceptions. Starforce is UNACCEPTABLE. I'd even go so far as to say, a game which may otherwise rate a "great!" to be downgraded to a "poor :( " for the inclusion of this cumbersome and flaky software. Any game with starforce I will have to rate as "Disappointing". Note my score breakdown, I did not dock points for presentation (graphics, sound) - I'm not just giving it low scores out of spite. Using starforce, however, nullifies any Value or Tilt, and deservedly so.
Conclusion: play it on the XBox, don't fall to temptation and mess up your computer with starforce - it's not worth the risk, and this game hardly merits it either.