I used to consider the hack and slash genre as a particularly foul and foolish endeavor, because no game came along and convinced me otherwise. The Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance landed on my door and changed my outlook on what exactly the genre could achieve… and my “re-birth” is just in time to review the Gamecube edition of the seemingly annual Gauntlet game.

Gauntlet: Dark Legacy is the port of the Playstation2 game that launched a long while ago, only now it has a four-player mode and a few new editions. It’s still for all intensive purposes the same basic game, which is mindless action against hordes of the undead using slash attacks and spells.

After playing Baldur’s Gate, it’s hard to look at Gauntlet the same way… it’s problems stand out more clearly, the lacking story, the lacking weapons system and inventory complexity that made Baldur’s an interesting game. It would be like comparing Shakespeare to Newt Gingrich (yes, he wrote a book). Stepping away from this shining beacon of an example however, we can see that Gauntlet: DL is a fun, if extremely flawed game.

The game revolves around killing things, lots of things… finding switches and opening treasure chests. That’s about it. Throughout this you have an ever increasing onslaught of enemies, all who can be killed by mashing the A Button with the occasional use of magic for ‘flavor’. See how this isn’t very deep yet? While you can choose from many different character classes, which adds the sense of depth, there isn’t a big enough difference to make it seem like a complex game. The fact is though that Gauntlet never even tries to pretend it’s complex… it’s just pure arcade fun, take it or leave it. The problem is, with the shallowness comes danger for the single player game… which is, to put it mildly, not fun. You have to have a group of friends and play some multiplayer, or this game gets worse and worse. You have been warned.

The graphics are very near what they were for the PS2, if not even a little worse. The framerate takes a hit, often acting quite slowly. The camera system is clumsy, and also devastating for multiplayer (but we’ll cover that later). Spell effects and spells are neatly animated, but also of rather low quality. Gauntlet: Dark Legacy does nothing to show off the Gamecube’s power, or to make it a better-looking game then it’s old PS2 counterpart.

The sound is a mixed bag… with the sound effects being great and the music being average. The music is just the usual synthesized stuff, some light rock and such. Typical arcade “let’s get the blood pumping” music, which never sounds memorable. The sound effects are good only because of the classic, over-the-top announcer. He alone saves the audio from being poor, with his delightful cries of “Blue Dwarf has gained a level!”
Still, the overall music package is average, simply because the generic music is playing all the time, while the announcer isn’t.

The replay value is all dependant on one thing: do you have friends? If so, this is definitely worth a rental, and if they hang out at your house enough it might even be worth a purchase. Quite simply, the multiplayer IS the replay value, no sane person would complete that long quest with only a single player. The mindless hacking and tapping of the A Button would drive you insane. With more friends, the game becomes suddenly bearable and much better for some odd reason… maybe it’s the teamwork elements or the competition aspect of it. If your friends are around for a long time, you’ll find Gauntlet: Dark Legacy is actually a very long game, and has lots of nice secret characters and such to unlock. Very nice… but I must repeat: this is NOT to be played as a single player game, because you will go nuts. The multiplayer mode isn’t peach perfect though. For one, the camera system is an abomination. When one player is on the edge of a screen, the camera (and therefore, the game) won’t move forward until that player moves forward. This creates several parts where someone may have taken a branching path and everyone is locked from continuing while one group backtracks and joins the other. While this is probably one of the better ways it could’ve been done, I’m convinced the camera could’ve been more lenient and not just lock up on the players like that. Still, the multiplayer mode is actually refreshing, and the already sluggish framerate doesn’t take any further blows with the inclusion of more players.

Gauntlet: Dark Legacy is not that bad for a party game, and definitely a recommended rent if you’re planning to have some friends over. The big question is always “should I purchase this?” In this case, I think the answer is ‘depends’. If you have friends around often, then go ahead… you could do much worse. But if you are ever forced to play by yourself, run away… fast. Single player Gauntlet is the devil!