Golden Axe: Beast Rider (PS3)
This so-called update will make you feel like a beast of burden.
10/21/2008 6:36 PM | 1 Comments | Page 1 of 3
What's Hot: The beasts aren't as un-fun as the rest of the game.
What's Not: Combat uses a terrible color-coded blocking system; Beasts are given no value at all; Experience is dreary and no fun at all.
Here's the original review I wrote of
Golden Axe: Beast Rider, which "updates" and reworks the formula that claimed so many quarters in 1989 as the arcade (and later Genesis) game called
Golden Axe:
If you're hungry to revisit the classic side-scrolling beat-'em-up through the prism of current game design, please forget this stillborn runt and enjoy Castle Crashers
instead. Thank you.
Unsurprisingly, that terse estimation of the game's value isn't quite to spec. Allow me to elaborate.
Beast Rider is a third-person, 3-D update of Sega's 2-D side-scroller. In the original, two players could choose between three characters before marching to screen right for 45 minutes, smashing more or less everything in sight. The game was fun, if not quite earth-shattering; most of the appeal came from pairing up with a friend (or, more often, a stranger) with whom you'd frantically alternate dropping quarters to buy another few minutes of evil-bashing.
The Krommath is the best of the beasts available early in the game.
Remove the title screen from this version and it would be almost unrecognizable as a
Golden Axe update. First off, this is a single-player game, which acts as a prologue to the arcade original. Sega promises that the next game in the series (should one occur) will feature multiplayer, but for now, the primary dynamic that defined the game is gone like Keyser Söze.
Instead of multiplayer, we get a tiresome, "sexy" heroine; enemies that are as repetitive as the combat required to destroy them; a weak defense and counter system; and bludgeoningly linear level design with checkpoints placed too far apart. If Sega presented this game by announcing that the company had invented a time machine, traveled back six years, and discovered a prototype version of
Heavenly Sword built for the PlayStation 2, it might have some appeal. As either a current hack-and-slash title or
Golden Axe continuation, it has almost none.
Or, to put it simply: The game just ain't fun.
Stilted one-on-one combat is all too often the meat of the experience.
The entirety of the action is based on a few small attack combos and magic spells. Two-button combos swing a hefty sword, and successful hits can lend extra power to the swing. When enemies attack they'll flash either orange or purple. Orange attacks can be dodged by hitting a left shoulder button; purple attacks are blocked by hitting a right shoulder button. Successful dodging/blocking will also lend extra power to your swing.
This could have been a triumph of tactical combat over arcade button-mashing, but it never works out that way. The system feels stilted and unnatural, and breaks any immersion the game might offer. By asking players to watch for color flashes instead of subtle changes in character stance or movement, combat never becomes enthralling. This is like a Guitar Hero system for melee combat, and it is forgettable.
In conjunction with the dodge and block movements, regular attacks can launch scripted special moves that correspond to particular enemies. That is, dodge a certain enemy's attack, then hit either the light or heavy attack at the right time, and a scripted death animation unspools. When they occur, these are impressive, but pulling them off is difficult to achieve. The timing feels wholly nebulous.
