"Hey! Gimme back my antenna, Conan!"

I liked Rastan. Rastan was a great game, coz when you died, your character did this uber-neat aging effect like the nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Nifty. Not only that, but you could choose from a nice variety of weapons, never mind the fact that you only need the claws to beat any level. Bosses were too hard, but hey, masochistic games are my forte.

I skipped Rastan 2, so we will not even talk about it.

And, this, the third installment of Rastan, makes me cry. You have three selectable characters, with small differences in speed and power. Gone are the weapon pickups, in their place are small piles of coins that give you back negligible amounts of health when you beat a level.

And gone is the challenge. You can WALK through the whole level until the boss, and if that wasn't shameful enough, you can just WAIT for the boss to die. Horrible, I say! There is a small reward in the gameplay wherein upon the completion of a level, you get a magical item that permanently increases one attribute, like fortune, speed, defense... pretty cool, but shallow. don't even get me started on the ''Misfortune'' events that occur at seemingly random intervals upon beating a level... sometimes, you have to complete another level just to get your item. Yuk. Another 5 minutes of walking. INSENSITIVE JERKS!

The character designs are quite a walk in Crapville also, as the main character now looks like an aging Conan armed with a boombox antenna. The ninja character, Dewey, is in no small part inspired by Conan's bumbling counterpart in the secong movie, save for Conan's sidekick was not named DEWEY. The dominitrix character with the whip is no big leap in creativity, either, but she's at least not a DIRECT ripoff. >.o

The sounds are subpar, just shouts and crappy music overlaying 16 bit-like graphics with repetetive, stupid enemies. The graphics are sooooo bad, that you can actually have quite a bit of fun with them if you imagine, when looking at the grimace of pain on your character portrait, Arnold Schwarzeneggar screaming ''STOP IT!'' every time you get hit. Gold.

In all, this game takes 20 minutes to beat and is a shameful Golden Axe ripoff. Go play Golden Axe 2 if you want a real slasher.

FINAL SCORE - 4/10

''Dewey! Stop doing Tae-Bo and help me kill the boss!'' *Slash goes the boombox antenna*
''Screw you Conan! Just wait 15 more seconds!'' *punch kick*

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 07/09/03, Updated 07/09/03