I don’t personally have a huge history with Gauntlet. The most I can say is that I played the NES game a few times when I was a kid in the 90s, but beyond that, RPGs are probably my favorite genre nowadays, and I do love a good casual hack and slash game, so I was expecting to have fun with this.
Story
Being a casual hack and slash game, the story is pretty light. I don’t really know what it is, but I think it has something to do with collecting shards from various bosses to do… something. If you’re coming into this game for a well developed plot, you’re going to be very disappointed, and you should look elsewhere. What you should be coming into this game for, is the gameplay.
Gameplay
The gameplay feels a lot like an arcade game. It’s very easy to pick up and play, and you don’t need to know much to get into it. It looks like diablo, but it’s very easy to kill enemies quickly. You have four classes to choose from to accomplish this. You’ve got your basic melee class with the Warrior, you have the well rounded Vanguard, the long distance Archer, and the useful but complicated mage.
The Warrior has his regular attack where he swings his axe around, a special attack where he spins and is invulnerable, and a lunging attack. I didn’t play too much with the Warrior, but he pretty much does what you would expect him to. I would say he’s the epitome of basic.
The Vanguard is the class I definitely put the most time into. She has her regular attack that acts basically like the Warrior’s, her special attack where she dashes with her spear which tears through enemies pretty effectively, and a shield that blocks damage from whatever you point it towards. This class is probably the easiest to play, since you have your shield which doesn’t break or turn off no matter how long you have it up. The spear attack works really well, and you can block right after using it, so if you play it smart, you’ll rarely run into danger while playing as her.
The Archer is a more interesting class, who definitely needs other people to be effective. There are these spawners in the game which pop up and raise mummy like things. Playing as the archer, your arrows by themselves don’t have enough impact to actually damage it. So you either need to rely on teammates to help take out the spawner, or use your special bomb ability to hurt it. You also have a dash to get out of bad situations, so if you’re trying to take out one of these spawners by yourself, you’re going to be running up to it, dropping a bomb, jumping away, and dodging a lot to get rid of it. It may be annoying to some, but I found it to be more fun having to move around and stay active a lot.
I barely played the mage because he’s the class with the steeper learning curve, aimed towards people who want more depth in this game. He has different magic attacks you can do with combinations of button presses. There are # in all which you have to keep juggling to stay effective.
Multiplayer definitely makes this game more fun. Normally with games that look like this, Diablo, Torchlight, stuff like that, I tend to stay away from multiplayer because I want to get immersed and focused on my character’s fight against the world. In this game though, it definitely feels more of a team effort, like Left 4 Dead, where you feel kind of bored without anyone else to play with. I’m not sure how large the community is, but I’d say since there aren’t any other versions of this on Playstation or Xbox, you’ll probably be able to find some people to play with online. Normally when there are multiplatform releases of games it tends to spread out the players. I know me Casey and Kahuna bought Splinter Cell: Blacklist when that came out on PC to play Spies vs Mercs, and then we came back to play it again two months after it had come out and the multiplayer was pretty much deserted . Same thing happened with Aliens vs Predator on steam. It was popular but then became a ghost town while the console versions still had a fair number of people playing. But since there aren’t any other releases of this game, if you want to play it, you have to get it on steam and that’s good for the multiplayer. I think later on they’re going to release Playstation and Xbox versions of this game, but for now you should be fine.
I used a controller with this since the gameplay is pretty simple. If it was a more complicated game I would’ve used my keyboard, but since it doesn’t need a lot of hotkeys I felt it’d be better with a controller. It played really well, and all the specials and attacks felt like they were where you’d expect them to be. Nothing ever felt like you were wading through mud or hampered by the controls.
The gameplay is of course very basic, but it’s really fun if you want to chillout and play something casually.
Graphics & Sound
The game looks a lot like Diablo, obviously. It’s slightly cartoony, but the color scheme is a bit dark. There are three different areas you go to, but each of them are just different versions of gloomy dungeons. I would’ve liked the game to have expanded further and taken you into different environments, so I was disappointed when they didn’t.
There isn’t much music that sticks out and overall it’s pretty boring, but the soundtrack of death and destruction is always a plus.
And though I wouldn’t want him to be obnoxious, I think the announcer could’ve used some more lines to say. In this day and age with Portal and Stanley Parable games with great condescending announcers, I think it was a missed opportunity.
Conclusion
Gauntlet is a pretty casual hack and slash arcade game. I wouldn’t classify it as an RPG, because there isn’t enough depth in it to satisfy hardcore RPG players, but it nicely keeps the look of one while having easier gameplay. It isn’t a loot fest like Diablo, there aren’t many customizations, and the game is very basic. Gauntlet, though, is just plain fun. Although it may not be a game with depth, and it’s not going to be anyone’s game of the year, Gauntlet is an awesome game to lazily sit back to, and go murder some mummies.
7/10
