Gauntlet Legends

"Beats having to play to continue every five minutes, now doesn't it?"

Games such as Gauntlet Legends come as a complete and total surprise to me in the way that they suck in a gamer and make them just want to play the game. With a new look and a new style of game play compiled into the age old formula of collecting and questing through huge mazes filled with enemies, Gauntlet Legends is what future sequels and continuations of ageless series should be! Taking the role of one of several different characters, you’re charged with the protection and the recovery of a broken stained glass window that kept an evil wizard trapped and away from taking over the world. Through hordes of enemies that range from the strange to the totally kick ass, Gauntlet Legends signs, seals and delivers the goods to any hardcore action gaming fan!

Gauntlet Legends places you in the midst of a massive adventure taking you through 20 + stages of goblin and monster smashing action. Your goal is to re-collect the missing shards of some mystical window in order to put an evil spirit back in its realm. When playing, you’ll find that there are secrets to unlock, items to collect, monsters to destroy massive bosses to conquer and statistics to raise. You’ll find that Gauntlet Legends plays much like an RPG of sorts, in which you’re required to level up to gain extra statistics to make it through other stages. Good stuff!

The best part of Gauntlet Legends, is the fact that you can play up to four players at once, which can get fast and furious, and mighty competitive. You’ll find that smashing out monsters, collecting the gold, and finding everything that the game has to offer in four player, can be fun, as well as frustrating, because your friends are out to get the one up on you. While you can’t really kill off your friends, you can try to screw them on gold and other items. Again, pretty good stuff. What’s more is that you can unlock secret characters for use in the game later on when and if you decide to play again for whatever reason. Most of what the game consists of is just collecting items and killing off your attackers before they overwhelm you in numbers!

Through the collection of gold and items, you’ll be better equipped to deal with the numerous and sometimes confusing puzzles that liter the landscape of whatever area you’re questing through. Gold doesn’t come easy and in order to make a living; you’ve got to do some serious killing and key collecting. Without knowing just how to go about raising statistics and otherwise, you’ll be looking at a game that can border on the very fun, or the very tedious depending on your preference! Just keep in mind that the most items, magic and gold you have, the better off you’re going to be in the long run. Selection of characters is always important when undergoing a quest like this, so find one who can suit your style and make you a supreme adventuring badass in due time!

The control has been ported over faithfully with all of the same special attacks and buttons presses required to make it through the arcade big brother. Perfect with the analog stick, your character movements are done near flawlessly, with an action, a magic and a turbo button to use as your attacks. You’re not left with any excessive button presses to gain extra attacks, as most of them are just a combination of two buttons pressed at the same time. With the Jump Pack, you’re given an adventure experience that is well worth playing! Cross this over with having several different buttons that you can press with analog movements for a seriously damaging special move and you’ll be reminded of a little game called Golden Axe in the way that magic is used. Talk about some serious homage to the real king of side scrolling action games!

Straight from the arcade cabinet to your Dreamcast at home, Gauntlet Legends offers you all of the visual flare and detail that you would have expected from the arcade version. Falling far away from the Gauntlet of old, you’re propelled into a visually intense world that offers you exceptional character detail, special effects and constantly switching camera angles. Short, interesting FMV’s round out the stages with displays of the upcoming foes that constantly attack you at a maddening pace! Without the addition of such things, you would be looking at a slightly mediocre game that relies heavily on the game play and not so much as the visuals or anything else. However, you’ll need to look past the different camera screw ups that come with too much action on the screen, such as the image break down and even cases of missing animation frames.

Adventurous music greets you through out several stages, and keeps up with the action that flows onscreen. Giving you several different tracks to listen to while you play, each stage music fits the mode. The pace is kept by a cross music that sounds like something out of the old Conan movies and makes you want to get into the melee of the battles that you end up facing! Sound effects come across a stereo system in crystal quality, even though the announcer’s voice can be a little blaring in the speakers, but it’s so rare that you won’t be too upset or turned off by it. Enemy voices come in the form of grunts, groans and threats while the other sound effects range from steel scraping on steel, the grunt and yell of your character with variations thrown in on different magic spells and special attacks being used.

Gauntlet Legends is one of those multi-player games that gives you the visuals, the audio, the game play and the control all wrapped up into one small disc. It’s worth the money that you may shell out, just to have it in your collection. You could pick this up as something to do for a weekend, but you’d be missing out on that action on a permanent basis. With the addition of playing four characters at once, the amount of challenge, difficulty and just overall competitiveness will really get to you and your friends after an hour of play. Definitely first rate stuff, you can’t go wrong with this version of Gauntlet Legends for your Dreamcast. With the release of Dark Legacy for the other competitive systems out on the market, you’re looking at the first and only Gauntlet title on this already dying home console!

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 12/21/00, Updated 11/20/01