Xena: Warrior Princess

"ay-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-YUCK"

Another day, another poorly-conceived, poorly-executed Zelda rip-off that makes a mockery of a popular franchise. The franchise in this case is Xena: Warrior Princess, everyone’s favourite B-quality television show based on the myths and legends of Ancient Greece, starring Lucy Lawless as the “princess forged in the heat of battle.”

It started out with the nice idea that there would be two games: Xena presumably for the girls, and Hercules for the boys. (If anyone remembers, Hercules was actually Xena’s sister-show starring the beefy Kevin Sorbo in the title role.) The games can actually be connected via the link cable so that Hercules, complete with his accumulated character powers and inventory, could wander around in Xena’s world, and visa versa. Great. The only problem is that the game really is awful.

It’s not the pure, unselfconscious kind of awful that a Barbie game exudes, but it often comes close. The most frustrating thing is perhaps that there are small pockets of playability, and even enjoyability, in the game. But these moments are fleeting.

It’s a game full of strange mechanics, erratic enemies, and crippling glitches. It’s one of those games that doesn’t let you enjoy it as a game, but instead constantly reminds you that it is nothing but a piece of programming – precariously held together programming which could be unraveled at any time by bugs or faulty logic – and that to finish the game means exploiting the game’s problems. Or, more accurately, trying to work around them.

Non-linearity can be a good thing. Choice can be a good thing. But if Xena, trapped as she is in the game's dreamworld setting of Psychosia, arrives at this village without first obtaining this item, often the quest will continue, in a crippled way, with townspeople reacting as though she had already picked up the item. Instability is definitely not a good thing.

The game simply can’t keep straight the sequences of items retrieval and event triggers, which sometimes leaves the player stuck in an interesting glitchy loop. It’s a skill that Zelda is able to maintain over clones like this: though the player is at times given the illusion of non-linear exploration, the chronology of task completion is always kept in check.

So what of the controls: Blocky, unresponsive, about what one would expect from a second-tier Game Boy game. Xena wields her sword and chakram (if you can find them both first, that is. I went for a large part of the game without even being aware of the chakram that was lying off in a corner somewhere waiting to be picked up). Expect many needlessly-lost lives because of the controls and the fact that almost everything you touch can hurt you, including the inhabitants of otherwise friendly villages.

It’s a pseudo-overhead view like Zelda, and like Zelda, you can pick up things, store them in your inventory, and select two items for quick selection using the A and B buttons. Sometimes, when Xena is exploring tunneled “secret passages” that lead from one main area to the next, the game will switch into a side-scrolling mode similar in appearance to the NES’s Donkey Kong (that’s 1985).

The rest of the graphics are better, but not pretty. Everything is boxy and unsexy, including Xena herself. Backgrounds are ugly walls-of-color, as though someone took a black and white Game Boy game and colored in between all the lines with felt-tip markers. The music is also primitive and annoying, but I suppose that's to be expected.

If this game tempts you because you’re a Xena fan, don’t let it. A much stronger fan-game (though flawed in ways of its own) is Xena: Warrior Princess for the PlayStation.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 12/11/03