Gauntlet: Dark Legacy User Reviews

by Crythania
from , ,

Mar 2, 2005

Being old enough to have grown up with the original Gauntlet arcade machine, I've always loved the original game. I remember playing Gauntlet with my sister on our Atari computer for hours upon hours. More recently, there was a Gauntlet game on the Sega Genesis that was pretty nice (Gauntlet IV).

Now we have Gauntlet Dark Legacy on the PS2. This game's story is about--... Wait a minute. Did I say ''story''? It's a Gauntlet game. It doesn't need a story. It's about dungeons, treasure, monsters, and mass carnage. What more could you ask for? Ah-hem. Anyway, the story's about some wizard named Garm who accidentally released the demon Skorne on the world. Skorne broke free of Garm's control, killed him, and imprisoned him in the Underworld. Then Skorne invaded the peaceful land with all of his monstrous minions. To set things right, our anonymous heroes have to find the twelve lost rune stone and some other magical artifacts.

The only safe place in the land is the wizard's tower where it all started. From there, you enter portals that lead to various locales in the land, all of which have been overrun by Skorne's evil minions. There are eight realms to visit. The eerie Forsaken Province, where zombies and ghosts run amuck. The Mountain Kingdom, where orcs and magma beasts dwell amongst the backdrop of volcanoes and lava flows. The Castle Stronghold, which is a large castle (naturally). The Sky Dominion, where magical sailing ships float on the clouds. The Forest Realm, which has been overrun by tribal lizard men and spiders. The Desert Lands, home to ancient ruins, a pyramid, and a large tomb full of mummies. The Ice Domain, home to dwarven mining operations that are now infested with trolls and snow worms. And the Dream World, home to a freaky circus and a haunted house.

Each realm has four or five normal levels and then a boss level. Each completed level opens up the portal to the next one. To enter the next realm, you need to collect a number of magical crystals, and in some cases a number of golden icons (golden snake fangs, golden eagle feathers, or golden lion claws). Each of the eight bosses guards a piece of a stained glass window that opens up the entrance to the Desecrated Temple where Skorne resides. Your ultimate goal is to collect all of these shards, enter the Desecrated Temple, and banish Skorne to the Underworld. Then you'll need all twelve of the lost rune stones to open up a portal to the Underworld so that you can go in there and defeat Skorne once and for all. Still with me? It doesn't really matter. Just go with the flow. This game almost plays itself.

To start out with, you can choose from eight characters to play. Warrior, Wizard, Valkyrie, Archer, Sorceress, Dwarf, Knight, or Jester. Some have a lot of Strength, some have great Armor, some have great Speed, and some have great Magic. All of these attributes should be self-explanatory. Your character can be one of four colors: Yellow, Blue, Red, or Green. And your character's appearance changes when you change his/her color (although the character's voice doesn't change). This is pretty impressive. And to top this off, there are a good number of hidden characters you can unlock and play. Excellent variety, and being able to customize my character's appearance is very appealing.

Each character has a normal attack (he shoots a projectile at his enemies), a slow attack (he shoots a more damaging projectile at his enemies), and two turbo attacks you can use when your turbo meter is full or partly full. In addition, you can always go melee if you feel like it. Just run up to the monsters and attack 'em at point blank. This nets more experience than shooting them from a safe distance. You can also collect magic potions and use them to unleash an area-affect of damaging magic. No matter what method you use to attack your foes, you gain experience for defeating them. When you gain enough, your character gains a level, and your four attributes increase (Strength, Armor, Speed, and Magic).

The controls go without saying. They're all easy to master. Move your character with the left analog stick, X for normal attack, square for slow attack, triangle for turbo, and circle to use a magic potion. Nothing complicated here.

That should cover the basics. Now on to the game-play.

Each of the eight realms has a theme. You'll be traversing spooky graveyards, a ghost town, a haunted mausoleum, a volcano, a large castle, an airship dock, airships, a swamp, a forest, a pyramid, a mining camp, a crystal mine, a twisted circus, and a haunted house, just to name a few. One of the final levels is based on the works of M.C. Escher. It has the never ending staircase, different perspectives, and contrast day and night.

Scattered about the normal levels are generators, which produce bad guys. You'll see zombies emerging from the ground nearby grave stones, orcs emerging from doorways in walls, beholders emerging from vent tubes, lizard men emerging from tents, and sorcerers emerging from mirrors, just to name a few. They keep coming after you until you break through the throng and destroy the generator. Types of bad guys include grunt soldiers who will come after you, shooters who will fire arrows, fireballs, or magic bolts at you, bombers who throw bombs at you, and suicide bombers who will run straight at you and try to do some damage with an explosion. There are also numerous mini-bosses all over the place. Generals are big guys who wield big weapons, Golems are large monsters, and Gargoyles are huge purple dragons with the head of a snake, eagle, or lion.

The gruntmen are the most prevalent, as they spew out of the ever-present generators. In the early levels, they're remarkably easy to cut through. As you near the end of the game, they emerge from the generators about as fast as you can kill them, so the only way to get to the generator is to use a turbo attack or area-affect magic.

Scattered about the regions you explore are all kinds of things. This game should be a collector-junkie's paradise. Food restores health. Treasure is used at the shop between levels to purchase items and stuff. There's a variety of power-ups including triple shot, extra speed, invisibility, and invulnerability. There are colored crystals you need to collect to open gateways to new realms. And there are golden icons (snake fangs, eagle feathers, and lion claws) that also open gateways to new realms. Some of this stuff is concealed in secret areas behind breakable walls. If you find a breakable wall, it flashes when you hit it. Hit it some more to break it and reveal the secret area.

Unfortunately, there's also a good variety of bad stuff. Poisoned food takes health. Junk takes gold from your coffer. Poisoned barrels are often conveniently placed next to food. They explode into an area-affect of poison if you accidentally shoot them, and the food is spoiled. Exploding barrels are also conveniently placed next to treasure and other useful items. Accidentally shooting one of them will destroy that treasure you wanted. Shooting a magic potion will also set it off (they're better when saved for when you really need them). Traps also abound. Spikes that emerge from the floor, steam vents, and other damaging things. It's all pretty annoying.

The two collectables you'll be collecting the most of are keys and magic potions. You can only hold nine of each at a time. Keys are used to open doors and treasure chests. Regular barrels can be shot or attacked, and they may contain a useful item. Treasure chests usually contain treasure, food, or some useful item, but some of them will also explode when opened (you wasted a key; isn't that just awesome?). And some barrels and treasure chests contain Death himself! He has two incarnations. Red Death drains health. Black Death drains experience. The only way to get rid of him is to use a magic potion or have an Anti-Death power-up.

There are nine playable secret characters you can unlock by finding an entrance to a secret level, which is a labyrinth with coins you have to collect. Get 'em all before time runs out, and you've unlocked one of the secret characters.

That should cover about everything. There's a lot going on here in the game-play and collectables departments.

The level designs aren't as much labyrinthine as they are... well, "gauntlets". There are some small alternate paths you can explore, and prevalent nooks and crannies full of goodies, but for the most part you're on a linear path from starting point to end point. There is a lot of gimmickry going on here. Switches and pressure pads operate moving platforms, elevators, cranes... Some switches remove barriers or open up hidden areas. Much of this is nonsensical. When I see a switch on a narrow floating platform that opens a door some twenty feet away, I have to pause and wonder "Where is the mechanism that causes this to work?" It's a switch on a floating platform, and there's nothing underneath it. But you can probably chalk it all up to magic. "It's magic! Who cares?" When you hit a switch that operates something off-screen, the view changes to show you what happened. At first, this is kind of confusing, but you get used to it.

This brings me to the game's worst feature, the camera. It's a third-person view that is constantly changing depending on what area you are in. You may start out with the camera at your back, but when you move forward into a new area, the view pans around to a side angle or some other *bleep*ed angle. It's constantly doing this as you traverse the levels, and some of the camera angles are downright poor. Often I will have a great panorama of where I've already been, but I cannot see what is directly in front of me. I kid you not. That awful, stubborn camera is more often than not a detriment to the game-play. I got accustomed to shooting blindly off-screen, not knowing whether or not I'd accidentally shoot an exploding barrel next to treasure or some other thing that might cause something bad to happen. This game is full of awful camera angles that will make you wonder just what kind of drugs the designers were snorting.

For what it's worth, the levels are true 3-dimensional designs. Take the Ghost Town, for example. You wind and twist your way through back alleys, through houses, through streets, and the camera is always moving so that you can see where you are without a wall or some such thing blocking your view. You get to explore both sides of a street with buildings lining both sides, and the camera will swing around to try and give you a better view as you cross from one side of the street to the other. But much of the camera angles were not very well thought out. My view isn't blocked by a wall, but I still can't see what's directly in front of me. It's very annoying. I would've preferred a camera that stays at my back and gives me a good panorama of what's in front of me. I understand that a lot of work went into the camera design, but perhaps that effort could've been better spent on less linear level designs... or better graphics.

The graphics are mediocre at best. Sometimes they look downright cartoony. I've seen PS2 games that sport great graphics and realistic-looking environments, and I can tell you... This ain't one of 'em. Much of the walls here are two-dimensional, sporting pre-rendered backgrounds that were painted on them. Same goes for the floors. Trees look two-dimensional when the camera pans around. They look like cardboard props for a stage play or opera. There is some decent atmosphere (at least the rooms in houses have furniture), and there's a good variety of scenery to see, but none of it looks real. Sometimes you can see a pre-rendered background behind whatever structures are in the foreground where you're walking around. And as mentioned, the level designs are all linear paths. This game does nothing to even try to bring its fantasy world to life. It doesn't give me the impression that I'm exploring a vividly-imagined fantasy world.

As far as the animations go, they're fine. The characters move around fine, the monsters are fine. The environments could've used a lot more work.

The sound here is below par. Each level has a different musical score that plays while you're beating up on the monsters, but much of it is uninspired and some of it doesn't even fit the scene. The music appears to be there just to fill the void in the background. It knows what it is and makes no attempt to rise above that. The sound effects are about what I'd expect from this type of game. Mostly a variety of grunts and growls as the various monsters die, a chime as you collect a crystal or treasure... Standard fare. Each character has a voice, and they'll say things when they pick up food or treasure. With two or more players, they'll occasionally interact. One guy opens a treasure chest, another guy grabs the treasure inside, and the first guy says "I'll get you for that!" That aside, the voice-acting is mostly reactions to finding a stash of food or taking a hard hit from a bad guy. The Valkyrie says "I like food!", the dwarf belches, and so on. Each character has a different reaction. As for taking a hard hit from a bad guy, it's about what you'd expect. They cry out in pain.

Throughout the game, the wizard Sumner keeps track of your progress. You'll hear his voice when you do something important like find a rune stone, collect enough crystals to open the gateway to a new realm, or defeat a boss. Why this guy Sumner isn't out there fighting at your side is beyond me. As far as I'm concerned, he's a moron. He sits in the tower paging through some sort of magic book while your character does all the fighting and stuff. You can get game hints from him while you're in the Tower (you're there whenever you're not traversing a normal level or fighting a boss).

But you probably won't need any hints because this game almost plays itself. Let's run through all the things you have to do. You need to collect colored crystals and golden icons to open gateways to all of the realms. You need to collect twelve lost rune stones. For each of the eight bosses, there is a special legend item that can aid you in defeating him. Naturally, these weapons ain't just sittin' around in plain sight. This seems like a lot, and much of this stuff is hidden. But just play the game, go with the flow, and you're likely to find most of it without even trying. I play this game with my sister, and she still doesn't know (or care) what most of this stuff is all about. That's how easy it is to play this game.

In fact, it's virtually impossible to lose this game unless you try. Your character has plenty of health to start out with, and it's not all that difficult to stay healthy throughout the entire game. Low on health? Just go back and replay one of the early (read: easy) levels and gather up the food there. Low on money? You can replay the easy bosses over and over again (they give out a lot of money when you defeat them). Missed a rune stone? Just go back and find it. Don't have enough green crystals to enter the Forest Realm? Just go back and collect more from previous levels. You can replay any level you've already been through as many times as you want.

Now I'm not one to complain about a game being too easy, but this one is beyond easy. And game elements like having to collect a certain number of crystals seem nonsensical in light of the fact that you can just replay one level over and over until you have enough crystals. You don't even have to find all of the hidden crystals. They're a novelty.

As mentioned, you go to a shop after each level. There's a good variety of stuff you can buy here. Food to restore lost health, keys, magic potions, power-ups. Great variety of power-ups. Triple shot, fire breath, light amulet, lightning shield, reflective shield, anti-death, gas-mask (protects from poison fog), x-ray glasses (to see inside barrels and treasure chests before you open them), invisibility, invulnerability... I'm just naming off the ones I can remember off-hand. There are plenty more. The problem here is that these power-ups don't last very long and you can't save them for when they might really be useful (they take effect immediately, and ones bought at the shop take effect as soon as you enter a level).

The RPG elements here are also pretty bland. With so many games out there like Diablo and Might & Magic VI where you get to spend points on attributes and skills after a level-up, a game where you simply level-up seems like a big step backward. The most you can do by way of customizing your character is buy an attribute-increasing power-up at the shop.

One last note before I shut up. The vibration function in this game can get very annoying at times. You get a thump whenever your character is knocked off his feet. This makes some of the boss battles rather annoying because most of their attacks knock you off your feet. It's annoying. I don't mind taking the damage, but the constant vibration is annoying.

Speaking of the bosses, they're not very interesting for the most part. Only the Lich and Spider Queen actually come after you. The rest all sit there tossing out mediocre projectiles at you. Some of these projectiles you can dodge; others you can't. Many of them knock you off your feet (annoying vibration). But aside from the Lich and Spider Queen, both of which keep you on your toes, you can just sit there in one place, keep shooting the boss, take the damage he tosses out at you, and then restock your health afterward.

Well, that's my review. To recap, I like the variety of playable characters. Great variety there, and I like the ability to customize my character's appearance. Some of the levels have some decent layouts, but they're all very linear. There's lots of carnage and collecting to do. Mediocre graphics. Mediocre sound. Linear level designs. Easy game to play. And a gawd-awful camera. You can play this game with up to four players. The two-player game is pretty decent, and it's kind of fun to work as a team and vie over who gets to collect the food and treasures. I'd say this game has a lot to offer in the replayability department but not much going on in other departments that would make replaying it a treat. A realistic-looking environment can make all the difference and bring a fantasy world to life. And a camera that shows you what's in front of you is golden.

"Elf needs food... Badly," the Gauntlet God would say during the days of yore when your elf character was dramatically low on health. To Gauntlet Dark Legacy, I say, "Gauntlet needs a better camera... Badly."

Gauntlet: Dark Legacy

User Reviews

Series

Gauntlet Series