Gauntlet ( 1 DVD )
In some sense, the world already has a series that carries on the Gauntlet legacy; it's called Diablo,
and clearly, it's done all right for itself over the years. That said,
while Diablo is accessible, it's not the kind of game you'd have found
swallowing up quarters for quick 10-minute sessions back when arcades
were still profitable. As such, there's room in the current landscape
for something far less ostentatious.
The Gauntlet reboot
wants so very badly to be that game, and on some level, it is. The
formula has changed little since the 1985 original. You have four
classes: warrior, valkyrie, wizard, and elf, and after a short
introduction to the controls and the personalities--there's some mild
but enjoyable Terry-Pratchettesque banter between the heroes
throughout--you walk through a door, down a hallway, and then jackhammer
the attack button into oblivion for the next six hours, laying waste to
skeletons, cave monsters, trolls, and sorcerers. When you're done
clearing enough rooms of them, and you've collected enough keys, eaten
enough meat, and stolen enough gold, you find the exit. You rejoice. You
repeat.
The
first stages of nu-Gauntlet almost give the impression that the game
requires just as little thought as its arcade forebears did. The good
news--and the bad--is that this is not the case. Like the best of the
best in this genre, Gauntlet does surprisingly solid work making each of
the four characters play wholly differently from each other. The
warrior is a straight top-down brawler; the valkyrie is a defensive,
reactionary, strategic class; playing the elf is like playing a
twin-stick shooter; and the wizard is an escapee from a real-time
role-playing game, whose attacks involve two-button combinations that
change spells from simple fireballs and beams of ice to full on cyclones
summoned up to level the playing field. Put all four characters in the
same level for some cooperative adventuring, and you've got a field of
absolute chaos the likes of which you rarely see. Yes, you can still
shoot the food. And yes, the game and your teammates are even snarkier
and angrier when it happens.
And therein lays the
problem. As much as Gauntlet wants to be the freewheeling alternative to
other, more complex dungeon crawlers, it also seeks to deepen its
decades-old gameplay, but does so in all the wrong ways. Ideally, a game
like this would allow the player to slice and dice through enemies in
one or two hits, but when all four classes are involved, even the most
basic enemies, like the skeletons and mummies roaming the first stages,
require putting some arduous work in. If friends are joining you, the
challenge contributes to the sense of teamwork that naturally occurs
when you have four different skill sets in play. If you're playing solo,
you're guaranteed to play each level a few times over because an
average grunt was able to demolish you in three hits, and you didn't
kill enough enemies to earn a skull coin, the game's elusive version of a
continue. All four characters have their own special versions of
crowd-control skills--the warrior has a Zelda-ish
spin attack, for instance, and the valkyrie throws her shield, Captain
America-style--but the expected catharsis of taking out entire fields of
your enemies in one fell swoop is nowhere to be found. Most of the
time, you're stuck with standard attacks, and none are as precise or as
free-flowing as you'd hope.
Yes,
you do have the ability to level up your characters. You can either buy
new gear from the shopkeeper in the hub, or by use of a mastery system
which rewards you for everything from killing a certain number of
enemies with specials to getting yourself exploded. Pursuing mastery
rewards gives Gauntlet a jolt of fun, but the rewards are slow coming,
and should you perish during a stage, the game takes away the gold
you've collected. And thus the stuff you could really use to get past
that hard stage is out of reach until you clear the stage without it.
Such cruel, cruel irony.
The end result is a game
that seems stuck in an uncomfortable middle ground, harboring more
intricacy and challenge than the Gauntlet pedigree implies, but too
bare-bones of a package to stand tall next to the action role-playing
games currently competing for your time. The new Gauntlet has charms,
and teaming up to take down the endless hordes is one of its most
gratifying ones, but in a game like this, you shouldn't have to fight so
hard for your right to party.