Remember the year 1993? I don’t really, but I DO remember getting a yellow Gameboy Original, a copy of Super Mario Land, and my favourite game of all time; The Legend of Zelda; Link’s Awakening.
22 years later, I boot up Gauntlet: Slayer Edition, and expect the same kind of feeling as I did way back.
‘Gauntlet: Slayer Edition’ is a semi-reboot of an Atari Arcade game from 1985; it’s basically a dungeon-crawling, hack-and-slash RPG that pits you against horde after horde of the undead, skeletons and demons.
This is one of the various free games that was rereleased and mad available for this month’s ‘Playstation Plus’ membership (more details at the end).
This release has various modes; single-player, CO-OP with up to 4 people, ‘Endless’ mode, and a ‘Colosseum’ mode. On opening the game for the first time I tried out the Single Player mode; and I’ll be honest it was pretty boring. It’s a very slow and repetitive gaming style; move from dungeon to dungeon, killing the hordes, getting the key, move on; it’s pretty standard.
However, after changing to CO-OP mode, the game became more enjoyable, way more competitive. Each dungeon saw me and my friend battling to see who could kill the most enemies, steal the gold the quickest, and get the ever-needed health items first.
Endless mode obviously pits you against an infinite stream of bad guys, each group harder to beat than the predecessors, and you see how far through the mode you can get. The Colosseum mode offers a leaderboard ranked, single room arena with various ‘seasons’ in which you use buttons to activate traps killing enemies and compete to see who can survive. These modes are fairly similar, and don’t add much scope to the game.
Whichever mode you choose, you have a choice of one of four characters to play as, each with it’s own unique abilities; Wizard, Warrior, Elf and Valkyrie. Every character has a load out which can be upgraded a customised; abilities, garbs, weapons, etc. This amplifies the need to steal as much treasure as possible.
Overall I’d say that this game is a fairly enjoyable game, that is more fun the more players that compete, however it suffers from receptiveness and linear gameplay.
PLAYSTATION PLUS
PS Plus is a monthly subscription service that not only allows you to play online with your friends, but gives you free games, themes and avatars every month. You can sign up monthly, or annually, online or grab a gift card in various stores (WHSmiths, GAME, etc).
