Sometimes, there’s just nothing better than a simple hack and slash. I’m not talking about something like the Devil May Cry or my beloved Ninja Gaiden series, what with their actual button combos and intricate game systems of different juggle states and their ‘strategy’ or 'thought put into the gameplay'. I’m talking about the classic arcade games of old. You get in there, mash on your buttons, kill a lot of stuff, and then go onto the next room/murder arena to likely do the same simplistic combat. They’re great. They’re the essence of video games distilled into its purest form of fun, and sometimes you just need that sort of thing- gameplay with less thinkin’ and mechanics and more, well, mindless hacking and slashing. Something where the gameplan goes a little like this;
Enemy bad, me hit enemy until enemy gone; me now strongest there is. Now next enemy. Me hit enemy...
And there’s no more storied franchise in this very deep and thoughtful genre than the arcade classic, Gauntlet.
It first started off in 1985 as an Atari arcade game, and a rip-off (allegedly) of an earlier game called Dandy; talks of a lawsuit quickly started flying, which was just as quickly settled behind the scenes. Classic. It’s a simple set-up; you pick from a few different character types, then walk around a top-down dungeon as you cut and/or arrow down never-ending waves of enemies trying to tear apart your pixels and steal your quarters while navigating mazes of locked doors and switches. Oh, and frequently dodging Death, the grim reaper; maybe even multiples, somehow. It smartly decided to focus on a multi-player design, allowing for multiple players to mindlessly exterminate grunts, lobbers and ghosts together while also allowing you to ruthlessly block your friends from ever getting any of the food. Maybe that was just me…
It went on to more or less birth the whole top down simplistic hack and slash genre, and from there was frequently ported to contemporary consoles of the time such as the various Atari and Commodore units and, eventually, the NES. Sequels of course eventually followed, and on Gauntlet went to dominate for years, its digitized cries of ‘Wizard needs food, badly!’ or ‘Valkyrie shot the food!’ breaking across the sonic chaos of arcade floors throughout the 80’s and early 90’s.
This isn’t a general Gauntlet series history article of course, but I have to lay a bit of groundwork. Simple game was great, **** the grim reaper, long lasting series that originated a genre; you got it. We’re of course talking about one-and-a-half specific Gauntlet games in this article here; the home console ports of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, with some mentions and background on Gauntlet: Legends which the former is an expansion/overhaul of.
The History; What You Clearly Come Here For
We’ll start with a little bit on Gauntlet: Legends, considering Dark Legacy is an expansion on this earlier game. Releasing in the packed gaming year of 1998, it was a revival, a renaissance, of the series’ arcade roots. By this point, Gauntlet had pretty much died; the last game previous was Gauntlet 4 on the Genesis in ‘93, which wasn’t even an arcade game. There hadn’t been a new arcade Gauntlet since all the way back in 1986 with the second game. The machines were by this point mostly out of commission, and the arcade scene itself had famously come to a crash by the late early 90’s. But, the absolute mad lads down at Atari decided to do one last ride for the franchise, and to go back to its arcade origins. The glory days of the room sized arcades, buildings entirely dedicated to stealing quarters, were gone but there was still some money to be had on a smaller scale, shoved into the back of movie theaters and bowling alleys.
Old arcade game ads just hit different.
It was very much the same as the original arcade game by design, having only one attack button and the same very simplistic gameplay that resulted. You shoot a projectile with your attack button when the enemy isn’t in front of you, and you bash them around with melee attacks when they are right in front of you. It was some of the things around that it innovated on. Gauntlet: Legends was the first 3D game in the series, letting you run around only the finest of late 90’s polygonal 3D graphics with your choice of Warrior, Archer (replacing the classic Elf), Wizard and Valkyrie. It was still in a mostly isometric, 3⁄4 's angle but was fully rendered in 3D levels. The game has just enough of a cartoonish look to it to be charming while also helping to mask some of the obvious graphical drawbacks of those early years. It also had something fairly unique for an arcade game at the time; character leveling, and even a way to save this within the arcade machine.
A first for the series, as you play your character would earn experience and gain bonuses for progressing in levels, being the expected stat increases as well as unique effects when using the classic magic potion. When you first put in a quarter and choose your character, you can enter a 3-letter name and a 3-digit password and by entering both of these when you next play on the machine, you’d be able to play as your same character and keep their on-going current level. It’s an ingenious idea, honestly; everyone wants to eventually hit the level cap of 99 which wouldn’t be possible for 99.9% of the arcade playing audience, so this way you could potentially do it over multiple visits and enough time (and quarters, it was an arcade game of course). I personally knew some people who had ongoing characters like this stored in a nearby movie theater arcade’s Legends machine, and would pop in for a few minutes here and there before their movie would start.
The first home console port soon released on the N64 in 1999, followed by an PlayStation release which came with bonus levels and, just about two years later, a Dreamcast release that combined Legends with some of the later additions that Dark Legacy made creating a weird sort of retroactive frankenstein, but doesn’t include the bonus PlayStation levels.
Legends is a great game in its own right, but we’re here more for its expansion, Dark Legacy. To me, Dark Legacy is the ultimate old-school Gauntlet game.
The Sorceress I think wins the ‘greatest ****ing arcade character haircut ever’ award, hands down; just look at that fine coiffure.
The arcade release of Dark Legacy followed Legends in 2000, and debuted a bunch more firsts for the Gauntlet franchise. It’s essentially a full on redo of Legends, a substantial overhaul that brought a bunch of new ****. It’s bigger and better in ways we’ll get into in approximately three paragraphs from now. For its home ports it saw release on just about every console of its time; it came to the PlayStation 2 first in 2001, followed by the GameCube the next year. It also had an XBox release a few months later, and then finally came to the GBA in a famously terrible port that you should never even look at.
We don’t talk about GBA Dark Legacy.
These ports are all mostly the same save for some tiny little strange adjustments here and there, as making things not confusing was something video game developers at the time didn’t believe in. The PlayStation 2 version is exactly as the arcade game without any additional adjustments, and plays perfectly fine framerate and performance wise. The GameCube port removed health bars on bosses, for some reason, but then put them in on later production runs to make it more confusing. Alongside its frankly terrible framerate drops, it also allowed you to stockpile items instead of just immediately using them when you pick them up like in every other version of the game. The XBox version is identical to the GameCube version with the item inventory, but with health bars and is the sharpest look visually with the best technical performance. Oddly, every version of Dark Legacy is missing the PlayStation bonus levels from Legends, despite being a remake of that previous game. Bizarre. There’s also a few other minor differences in controls across some of them, like the XBox version requiring you to hit two buttons to use one of your big screen clearing moves instead of just one like in the PlayStation2 version.
Enough dry but necessary background details; let’s get into the game itself, and finally play Gauntlet: Dark Legacy after like two-and-a-half pages. Classic Octopus move, am I right?
The Game: What You Skipped The History Section For, You Know Who You Are
For this review, I’m playing the PlayStation2 version of Dark Legacy. The XBox version is likely the definitive version in most ways given its better performance and inventory system, but the items aren’t so dominating that it’s a ‘nerf’ to not be able to stockpile them. Also when I played the XBox version and recorded footage of it, this was the result;
Yeah, I’m thinking the Sony version is just fine. God ****ing damnit Xemu, you temperamental creature.
It takes the base game of Legends, then shoves in so much additional content that it’s practically exploding with magic potions, unlockable characters and a lot of charming 2000s era goofiness.
You pick from eight initial classes, with four being series regulars and returning from Legends; the Warrior, Valkyrie, Archer (the renamed OG Elf), Wizard, and the new characters of the Sorceress, Jester, Dwarf, and Knight. Each of them has certain levels in four key stats, with the four new classes being based on the ‘veteran’ ones save for minor differences in these stats. There’s strength which is the character’s damage; armour, which is their health; magic, which is the damage of their special room clearing ability; and speed, which is of course how fast they run and attack. The Sorceress is very similar to the Wizard, but she has less strength and more speed, as an example. The returning OG’s generally greatly specialize in one stat with it starting at 600, and you may even notice that they perfectly align with the number of stats even; imagine that.
The most significant change that Dark Legacy makes from its vanilla version, other than the new classes, are the substantial gameplay adjustments. No longer do you have only a single attack button; now you have two, dude. You have your normal ‘quick’ attack that you can rapidfire, and a heavier but slower strong attack that’s particularly useful for the various mini-bosses you’ll encounter. When you’re in melee range, you can also combine them to make basic combo strings which can kill a lot of grunts at once if you get surrounded, which you absolutely will. Oh, you will.
Just another day on the job, really.
Returning untouched from Legends is the turbo meter, which is more or less just a super type deal. Using this turbo gauge lets you do some really silly **** to utterly decimate whatever unfortunate foe is in front of you, and in mass numbers. These turbo moves are character dependent, but are either big AoE attacks or piercing attacks that move through multiple enemies and even walls in some cases. Each character has two, but gets some special sauce on them as they level up. These turbo moves are frequently where the Gauntlet sense of humour comes out, with them being some combination of silly yet badass. My favourite? The Archer pulling out her shoulder mounted ‘BFG’ (the game’s words, not mine) which shoots nigh untold numbers of arrows directly in front of you for a few seconds.
As far as BFG’s go, it’s pretty solid. Like an 8/10.
The magic system also returns untouched, seeing you able to throw potions you’ve picked up at enemies to murder large numbers of them; it’s all about numbers here. They are still the only thing that can kill Death of course, which is a very strange sentence to say.
Yeah yeah, I get it; he’s the personification of decay and atrophy or whatever. Just **** off already, Death.
Further new additions, as there’s many, are the inclusion of a short duration and timing based block/parry type thing, button based strafing that lets you slowly launch projectile attacks while slowly moving, and even charging forward like a monstrous wrecking ball while also blocking in exchange for spending some of your turbo gauge. For a simple game like Legends by design was, these fundamental boosts feel that much larger in Dark Legacy. Button combos in my Gauntlet game? Charging? Blocking? Complete madness. **** yeah.
We even have shoryukens!
Spooky lava caverns, oh my! The level design is pretty solid, and combined with some nice camera work can make the levels feel really fun to slaughter in.
Dark Legacy, like Legends before it, follows the same straightforward gameplay as the OG Gauntlet, save for all the additional moves and shenanigans we just talked about. You still run across different worlds/realms, each separated into five or so levels each, battling hordes of various monsters while looking for those precious keys and switches to get through the various obstacles in front of you. The monsters just keep coming at you, constantly spawning from generators that you also have to destroy. This time around however the levels are much more varied and fantastical given the generational jump of technology, in addition to Dark Legacy adding in more; maybe even close to double the levels over Legends. You ruthlessly ****ing exterminate thousands of disgusting freaks across deserts, spooky swamps and graveyards, cozy riverside mountains crawling with goblins and orcs; the works. My personal favourite is probably the castle world, seeing you start by sieging the front courtyard in the first level to working your way through the dank dungeons and halls proper in the following. It’s got some nice level design to it, with crumbling battlements and rats spawning out of giant floor cheeses. Also, you fight a dragon at the end so, it should be obvious why it’s the best level.
The secret code characters can get a little funky.
And there’s items/power-ups to collect. There’s so many items. You got your series mainstay of magic potions, three-way shots and the customary metal skin texture of invulnerability of course, but there’s a whole smorgasbord of new items, too many to even list or mention. Once you use one, generally its effect lasts for a little bit of time with a few exceptions, like the series trademark potion which obviously just explodes unless you pick it up. Like I mentioned above, different versions of Dark Legacy have different ways of handling items with the GameCube and XBox version letting you add them into an inventory when you pick them up instead of immediately using them like in every other version. The items are very strong for sure, but I never really felt like I was at a fundamental disadvantage with not being able to use them on demand in the PlayStation2 port.
Rocks fall, everything but me dies for once. Nice.
Of course, the Gauntlet series is known for primarily one thing above all else; the multiplayer chaos. These games absolutely hit above their quality class when you get some friends mashing alongside you. Singleplayer, like I was doing for this review, isn’t unplayable or anything but the game truly shines as a truly chaotic co-op horde mower so it’s something to consider. It becomes all the more eventful, even with friendly fire turned off. You wouldn't turn it off though, would you? Why would you do that?
Something new for Dark Legacy over the OG Gauntlet is the inclusion of a whole lot of big screen-filling bosses. There’s even special hidden, one-time-use items scattered around the worlds that deal significant damage to specific bosses to help weaken them right from the get-go which I would recommend hunting for, as the bosses have some **** off sized health bars. There’s rarely any real gimmick to the fight save for keep mashing and dodging until they die, but they have some great spectacle to them.
That's a big ass Lich, for sure.
The new combat mechanics and the charming levels are great, but my personal favourite thing about Dark Legacy is just how fun it is, both in terms of the gameplay and the overall vibe, it's purity. The characters are goofy with their turbo moves often being incredibly silly, there’s a whole bunch of hidden stuff like levels and items to find, you can turn into a fireball launching chicken named Pojo, there’s animal themed furry versions of each character you can unlock through finding secret level entrances. Yes, you read that correctly; furries, and even a few more secret characters on top of that and more secret character appearances than I can name through inputting specific names on the character screen. There’s even technically four different versions of each character, as changing their colours when you make them changes them into different visual themes, like red turning them into a Viking look or yellow making them ancient Egyptian themed. The whole thing really just screams that really charming early 2000s gaming energy of just throwing whatever they thought was cool in, complete with comedic ending screens of all the characters having a pool party, presumably after genociding like a million skeletons and an evil wizard or two off the face of their dimension.
It’s also got that ‘kitschy and risque but somehow still kind of fun and wholesome’ sexuality going on, that weird early 2000’s advertising special.
The game is also long. It is utterly packed with levels and worlds and golden fang tokens to unlock more realms and crystals to unlock worlds and you have to find all the legendary items and bonus stages to get the furries and- yeah, it's a lot. I played a scientifically measurable **** ton of Dark Legacy for this review, particularly for this kind of game; going off all my capture video lengths, a little over a dozen or so hours and I barely scratched the surface. Mind you I did jump around characters a lot which meant replaying stages over and over again, but still. Fifteen hours and I only got to the third realm, and there’s upwards of eight depending on what you count as a realm. You will not be running out of levels to systemically obliterate monsters in, I can promise you.
Basically, Gauntlet: Dark Legacy is a hell of a lot of fun, assuming you’re into this kind of game to begin with. Like I’ve said a few times now across my reviews, it’s the kind of genre that you’re either into or not, with very little middle-ground. It’s really the only major negative I can say about the game, is that it’s obviously going to get repetitive in its simplistic nature. But what it does offer is just some classic brainless, mindless fun when so many other games would try to be all fancy with their 'strategy' or 'story'. Sometimes, you just need to mash skeletons and werewolves to death with silly characters.
Dark Legacy is also a great example of how an expansion can entirely replace its base game, up there with Ninja Gaiden Black and War of the Chosen with the modern X-COM 2. You can still enjoy Legends for sure, but Dark Legacy is simply the same fundamental game with just more. I can see purists preferring the far simpler OG Gauntlet one-button gameplay style of Legends perhaps, but for the casual fan who just wants to jump into a game in this esteemed franchise, it’s definitely Dark Legacy to me. Just don’t play the GBA version under any circumstances, even just for a one-off screenshot for a review. It’s just not worth it, man.
Until next time.
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