Gauntlet Legends

"Not all arcade games work at home"

Gauntlet Legends was one of those really interesting. offbeat arcade games, one that stood out in the flood of me-too fighting, racing, and shooting games that seems to crowd every arcade. You’d think it’d be a natural for a console port, right? Unfortunately, wrong.

In case you’re not familiar, Gauntlet was one of a now-dead genre of top-down adventure games on the Atari and its predecessors. Arguably one of the best, it had a couple of inferior sequels on the NES and Genesis.

The original formula is still present, with fairly generic heroes (barbarian, valkyrie, elf, and wizard) walking around a top-down dungeon for no other reason to but to kill a near-endless supply of monsters and take the gold haphazardly scattered around. The story is unambitious, to say the least, with a massive demon named Skorne having locked the power of your mentor. Guess who gets to go track it down.

What sets it apart from its predecessor is character development, where you can build levels in the classic RPG style, and use money to buy power-ups, ranging from permanent stat bonuses to various magical effects. This lends an RPG element to what is an old, old, archetype, but unfortunately does water down the differences of the classes after a while.

The graphics are nothing too special, with fairly simplistic character design and generally unspecial effects, but the level designs are nice, and lend a little variety to what is essentially repetitive gameplay.

And there’s the rub. The gameplay is what you would expect from an arcade game, simple and robust. But, after about an hour, it’s just the same drone over and over again. You’ll spend ENTIRELY too much time in each stage looking for that one switch you missed, and the stages are so long that it’s really not worth going back for the couple of bonuses you may have missed. It truly is paced for an arcade, with looooooong stages and bosses that you really need the continue of another token to beat.

With little flaws like needing a memory pack to save (Who has an N64 memory pack?) and an occasional nigh-impossible boss, I really can’t recommend this to anyone but rabid retrogamers or anyone who can get it out of a clearance bin for $10. It’s worth a rental, at least. if you can find someplace that still has it.

Final Rating: 4/10, for nostalgia and stage design, but droning gameplay and minor flaws.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 11/25/01, Updated 11/25/01