Gauntlet Dark Legacy

"A Continuation of Legends"

With the emergence of Gauntlet into the next generation, a sequel was inevitable and in some cases, warranted. With Dark Legacy, you're looking at an expansion of Legends that offers you new classes of characters, and several new areas to quest through and defeat! Where that ends, the repetition of levels and enemies comes forward, in terms of the same items, the same bosses and the same areas over and over again. Something that has changed though, is the fact that you only get a low amount of health for every quarter you throw into the machine. Talk about cheap!

Set a couple of years after Legends, you're returned to the land in search of the evil that you fought the first time around. In this, you can unlock other characters through the bonus stages that you may find as you quest through, and you'll find that the areas are the same as they were last time, so everything is in the same spots!

-Game Play 8/10-

Gauntlet is a questing game, and Dark Legacy is nothing different than Legends. Offering you a couple of new classes to use, a huge set of in-battle items and treasure to find, you'll find that it does get old in a quick way once you've found that most of the game is set in a straight-forward manner. Looking for special items takes little more than wandering around enough to find switches that open doors and raise platforms.

In order to continue onward, you must find crystal shards that break down barriers around other stages. Once that's done, you can travel from realm to realm to find special weapons to use against the level bosses. Enemies will come at you in hordes until you break down their generators, and they come in all shapes and sizes!

Special Items can be found that open up new aspects of the character classes, which does raise the replay value on the game. However, unless you have two other people or friends who are willing to go through the game with you, you'll find that it does get very repetitive in a very quick way!

-Control 8/10-

The button set-up here is limited at best, and what it does have to offer can be rather aggravating. Giving you a defend button, a light attack button, a heavy attack and then a turbo, the button spacing is set too far apart to effectively use all of them in battle, and most of the battle is just hack and slash anyway, so no worries there!

-Audio 8/10-

The musical scores are pretty well made, and fit each and every world and sub-worlds accordingly. Some of the best music is found in the beginning of the game within a Ghost Town, but then after that it slow starts to just meld into the background without much of a fight. The sound effects sound good at first, but after about twenty minutes, you've heard it all and are looking for the mute button. The voice overs are neat to hear, but they sound like the guy has smoked too many cigarettes and is just starting to feel the effects...again, it melds into a rather noisy mess!

-Visuals 8/10-

Gauntlet: Dark Legacy hasn't changed much from the Gauntlet Legends in terms of how it looks with the camera angles. Some of the stages are well detailed and well thought out, but in most situations the stages are too dark to see the real detail that the game is definitely capable of! With that being said, some of the enemies are just ported over copies of what appeared in Gauntlet Legends and the cut scenes, which are neat to look at appear too far and in-between to make any true impact!

-Quarter Crunching 9/10-

If you want to continue, you'll have to buy health every so often. This can be quite costly, as the game is about fifty cents to play, and then a quarter for every hundred life points you want to buy! Not only that, but you're on a reducing life bar, that loses points no matter if you're standing still or fighting. Consider this Midway's attempt to make some serious cash!

-Overall 8/10-

Dark Legacy is a return of Legends with a couple of new stages, but the same old enemies and themes. With the expansion of stages and quests, you'll find that the game takes forever and you'll need plenty of quarters to make it even a quarter of the way through! With that being said, Dark Legacy is worth playing a couple of times, and if you've got a character and wish to continue it, the password feature is still there, so get to questing naive!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/27/01, Updated 09/27/01