Oh god. Golden Axe. A cult classic, one of the really good beat ‘em ups back on the arcade, or, where I remember it, on the Sega Genesis. This game kicked an immeasurable amount of ass. The fighting was fun, the spells looked cool, you had multiple characters to choose from which varied the gameplay, it became quite challenging, and it was a pure blast to play with a friend. Golden Axe was truly Beat ‘em up perfection (well, just after Ninja Baseball Batman). With it’s last appearance in 1995 on the Saturn, the series was pretty much dead.

In 2006, Sega announced a sequel to the series. Little was known until October 2007, finally, in October 2008, the game is finally  out, but nothing could’ve prepared us to the total awfulness of this game. Like many Golden Axe fans, I was psyched to see this coming back. In my mind there was nothing that could’ve gone bad considering they had an incredibly solid foundation for the game. But oh boy was I wrong.

I’ll just make a note here and say that no, I didn’t finish the game. For good reason too, because it’s god awful and I never finish bad games. So unless there’s some big breakthrough past the fourth chapter and the game somehow becomes good… Nah, won’t happen. Take this review as you will, but I’ve put more than enough hours in this piece of crap to tell you how bad it is.

Read on! And I’ll try to keep this as short as possible, the less I talk about this game the happier I’ll be. 

Graphics
Well the first thing I’ll mention is Tyris. The girl from the old game. She looks nothing like before.
  
Yeah, a bit different. Hair color changed, hair length changed, new slightly less revealing suit (though you eventually unlock the classic look), weird makeup, completely oversized and weird looking sword(you don’t see it here) . She’s not really similar… She is a sexy woman, but that’s the only similarity.

Otherwise… well, as you can see from the screenshot, the characters don’t look too bad… oh wait, that’s during cinematics, which look pretty good. The actual graphics aren’t really good. Just a step above the best PS2 graphics, which isn’t exactly saying much for a next-gen system. The animations are stiff, lifeless and just completely unnatural, except for the beast which move… slightly better than the rest. Graphical glitches are everywhere. And the environments are really lame and have no variety until you get further in the game. The first 3 “worlds” look exactly the same, with slightly different background… meh. Overall, the game doesn’t look really good. Considering how good the cinematics look, it’s strange how dated and lazy the rest looks.

Gameplay
The gameplay. The most important part of a game. If the gameplay isn’t good, no matter how good the other elements are, the game is gonna suck. And the gameplay here… Really, really, sucks. But I’ll go in just a bit more detail.

Fighting
Well the fighting is relatively simple.  X does fast attacks, square does powerful attacks, and both at the same time does a knockback attack. You can link those together to do different attacks. You can jump with triangle. And Circle will either do one of your 2 magic spells or use the Golden Axe (which is useless! at least up to where I was) depending one what you’ve got selected.
The controls are simple, and… they really suck… Okay, there’s no difficulty curve and they’re easy to use. That’s not the problem. They’re just unresponsive.  Sometimes your attacks lock-on to enemies, sometimes you’ll be attacking someone and turn to another target that’s out of range. It’s really all over the place.
Anyways… well fighting is all about evading enemy attacks and countering. Similar to Heavenly Sword, enemies start glowing or something to tell you what type of attack they’ll do next, and you have to do the proper maneuver to “catch them off guard” and unleash combos or attacks.  Orange means you must evade with L1, Blue means you have to block with R1, green means either will work and Red means you either have to get away or jump. This works pretty good… When there’s only 1 enemy fighting you. If you’re fighting multiple enemies, and they both unleash a dfferent type of attack, well chances are you’ll get hit. A lot. But the worst is the unresponsive controls, or just the completely screwed up timing to avoid some of the attacks. You see the orange sign, so you press your button, but it doesn’t work. Try again with another timing won’t work either. It’s almost random. Sometimes you do it too early and it works. And it’s even more confusing when you’re surrounded by enemies. Bosses are pretty boring to fight too, with simple patterns you must learn and when you know what to do their lifebar goes down relatively fast.
Magic is mostly used for “puzzle” “solving” (yes, I quoted both words) but can also be used to fight. as mentioned before, the  Golden Axe is useless in it’s incomplete form, but the fireball is pretty strong, and the fire shockwave can go okay damage to a bunch of surrounding units which can really help. This uses up potions, which you have 6 of. The fireball uses 1 and the shockwave uses 2. The Golden Axe uses nothing. Along with attacking with magic, you can also take a few tries to figure out the timing to evade or reflect magic. Which is pretty hard, especially if 2 enemies are shooting magic at the same time. The spells don’t look nearly as good as before (which is sad).

There’s a variety of enemy types… Armored melee enemies, strong melee enemies, medium-range melee enemies, weak melee enemies, medium melee enemies, more strong melee enemies, something between medium and weak melee enemies and 2 types of spellcasters… OH and enemies riding beast (which you can steal from them if you want). Armored enemies you need to chip off their armor until their helmet is gone before being able to damage them, and the rest is pretty much self-explanatory. The rest die either fast or take a big amount of slashes to die. And sometimes it’s random. Some enemies a fireball will kill them, but the exact same type of enemy a few minutes later won’t die and will require a few combos to kill.

Overall, the fighting is really not fun at all. The timing is stupidly hard for certain attacks, and when enemies start bashing on you your lifebar will go down fast. It’s completely unbalanced at parts and insultingly easy at others.

Camera
Yeah, the camera sucks enough for me to make a sub-section about it.  You control the camera by moving the right stick, but even when you move it to a desired location, don’t worry, the game will do its best to make sure you don’t see what you need to within seconds. The camera is literally always moving. It’s hard to focus on one thing, and during battle against multiple enemies, don’t expect to be able to see a lot more than 2 enemies properly at the same time. This means it’s hard to evade any kind of attack when you’re surrounded (moreso than if the camera was actually good). If you’re fighting a bunch of melee enemies nd there happens to be spellcasters out of your range… well the magic attacks will pummel you since there’s no way you can possibly see them coming.

Beast Riding!
One of the trademarks of the original Golden Axe games was that you have some cool beast to ride. Undescribable pink things, dragons, whatever, they were fun to use and some of them gave you an advantage over the enemy. Well… That’s not exactly false here, but it’s not exactly true either. Well first things off, the beast control badly. Not surprised. They move incredibly slowly if you’re not pressing the run button (yeah, there’s a run button, Tyris alone can use it too), their jump is somehow worse than Tyris’ and graphically glitched (yay) and they control like tanks. If you’re not running, turning is long, and if you are running you have to do detours to turn around. Lame.
Each beast has 3 attacks, using the same buttons as Tyris for different attack types. Special attacks, using Square, take off a Beast’s lifebar. Lame. Normal attacks, using X, change depending on the monster you’re using. Other than the one from the bigger monster, they all suck. The hit detection is pathetic with the weird thing on the cover of the game, and the cat-like thing just pounces randomly but somehow always passes next to your target.

The beast riding is really lame. Bad controls, lame attacks, and sometimes it’s just more effective to just fight normally.

Other Stuff
Well now I’ll just complain mindlessly. Because I don’t feel like going too much in detail with any of this.
Golden Axe was a great multiplayer game. Here, there’s no multiplayer. This is stupid. It might not have made the game any better, but at least it could’ve stayed true to the originals.
You can only play as Tyris. Sure, you see the badass dwarf guy early, and you might see the big muscle dude later on, but they most likely do nothing(the dwarf gives you the golden axe and tells you to repair it, but that’s it). SURE, I only used Tyris when playing the original Golden Axe, but that doesn’t mean a little variety wouldn’t be nice.
The puzzle solving is incredibly simple so they hide things in completely random areas to keep you running like a headless chicken until you finally find it by using the horrible camera.  And it’s always the same thing. Either destroy statues with the golden axe, light up torches, press switches or kill enemies.
The gnomes from the previous games are back, and they’re more annoying than ever. They carry food, potions and… money I guess? But unless you’re running and not on a beast and only using fast attacks, you’ll never hit them.
The devs also think you’re really stupid and that you really suck at games in general. You can never see healing circles or potion giving circles in certain levels (which automatically and infinitely heal either your life and magic), but in one level you’ll see 2, and they’ll be there DURING long fights. Why? You can just stay near that and you’re sure never to die.  Do they really think you suck so much you can’t go through 15 enemies without needing to get to full health every 30 seconds? Seriously… Such randomness.
Speaking of randomness, well the game is surprisingly quite easy, so to try killing you, the game will randomly place traps at parts where there weren’t any before in hope you’ll die. Of course, they do minimal damage and there’s a fucking healing circle right after the traps, so what’s the point? It’s just slowing me down.
The story sucks. It makes little sense, and it barely ever advances at all. At first it looks almost okay, but after the first chapter, there’s nothing. Lame. I’ve gone through 3 chapters now and started the fourth, and nothing happened. I fought stuff and found a piece of the Golden Axe, but that’s barely story advancement.

There’s probably more I can whine about, but I’ll stop there, the review is long enough as it is.

Overall
After writing this, I’m not playing this game anymore. It’s just so bad. It’s incredibly disappointing (almost insulting) to Golden Axe fans, and it’s not a good enough game to stand on its own so non-fans will not like it either. The game is just plain incomplete. The game as a whole just feels like they tacked on a bunch of random elements and gave it the Golden Axe name to get more sells. It’s not a finished game at all.
The gameplay is barely worth mentioning, the lack of multiplayer makes it even lamer, only 1 playable character is sucky and, overall, it doesn’t feel like Golden Axe, and it shouldn’t have been approved for release at all, no matter if it would’ve had the Golden Axe title or not. Finish your damn games before releasing them!

jobocan Games, Review