Golden Axe: Beast Rider

Review from Matt and Matt - Thursday, 13 November 2008 @ 11:16am

I don't often review games, because I don't have a lot of free time to play, and there are better uses of my time, such as maintenance and upgrades to the AG site and our other sites. But every now and then someone says something that makes me want to review a game on principle. Peter Moleneaux requested reviewers to get a non-gamer to play and see how they play before reviewing Fable II. As a gamer, and one who already hates on Fable I took that as a challenge. The same could be said of Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, where the developers dismissed criticism by saying the game was "not intended for hardcore players". Lair shipped with a review guide explaining to reviewers that the controls certainly didn't blow goats, and providing alternative control schemes was unnecessary.

The latest attack on reviewers isn't from a publisher, though, it's from a reviewer. Dave Halverson of Play magazine in the US has slammed the overall extreme negativity of Golden Axe: Beast Rider reviews. While at least one of the points he makes is valid (games should not be reviewed on the basis of "review events" by the PR of the publisher that provide only a minimal sample of the game) the rest is rather startling in its aggression and arrogance. In particular his dismissal of the entire online sphere of gaming journalism smacks of the fragile hubris of a dying monopoly.

His statement is possibly best summed up by "But to score Beast Rider below a 7 is just irresponsible.".

That made me curious. Was there something to this? Is Golden Axe: Beast Rider being given inadequate treatment by reviewers? Or is Mr Halverson just defending his own minority opinion, a positive view which seems to be an aberration based on the reviews of his peers. In particular is there a specific point where you've played "enough" of Golden Axe: Beast Rider that your opinion changes and it becomes good?

So I grabbed our review copy, and gave it a whirl. I originally though I might blog the review, writing an entry after each play session. But it got hard to organise things like the feed. People would get 1/15th of a review and never know the rest had been updated. So I decided to log my thoughs as I played, and then put it live at the end, to see if my thoughts changed from beginning to end.

And most of all, at the end I'll state my opinion of Mr Halverson's comments.

11:18pm, Sunday October 26th

I just finished my first play session of Golden Axe: Beast Rider. It's worth pointing out that when I first started up the game the developer logo came up. My flatmate on seeing that said "Oh, that's the guys who did IronMan."

"OH FUCK!" IronMan was a game I played but not enough to review it. I meant to finish. But... i just couldn't. It was so bad. It was the worst game I've played, certainly in a long time. Everything about it was terrible. It didn't even use footage from the awesome movie for its cutscenes. Instead it used very very bad CG, for no reason. But I'm not reviewing IronMan. A developer can make a game that's bad for a lot of reasons, especially when it's a license they may not have much freedom with. So how does this title compare?

Riding a beast. In beast rider. Yay!

Golden Axe: Beast Rider is terrible. It's not as bad as IronMan, but it's so freaking bad. How did this game make it through beta?! Combat is awful. The graphics are awful. Though there are a few good laughs they're at the game, not with it.

Golden Axe: Beast Rider (GA:BR) so far sucks spectactularly. It starts off with a quick intro as Tyris Flare goes to some sort of ceremony for her "order". There is no explanation given. Who the hell is she? Why is she there? What's she trying to do? She sees a member of her order lying dead and then it jumps straight into combat.

Actually, no. It jumps into an explanation of combat. The game pops up huge boxes, showing first person text detailing how to fight. By first person text I mean it literally says "I will press X for a weak hit!" and later "By combining these techniques, I will be unstoppable!"

It's incredibly stupid. The notion of such a clumsy internal monologue is laughable. I will open the Weet Bix! I will get out a Bowl! I will get milk from the fridge! With these things combined I will have BREAKFAST!

Combat is clumsy. The usual two buttons "weak and strong" plus a "boot" that knocks them down. Combine in various uninspiring combos. There's also evading, parrying, and counters. They all suck. When the attack is blue hit R1 (parry). When the attack is yellow hit L1 (evade). L1 will make you dodge the attack, circling around the opponent. R1 will raise your sword, blocking the attack. If you get the wrong one you get hit. Well, actually, if you parry and it was yellow, you still block it, you just get staggered a bit. Whereas if it's blue and you try to evade you get swatted thoroughly. Counters are basically attacking just after you parry or evade. You can get in a combo too.

The evade/parry mechanic is surprisingly hard to get the hang of. The timing is really precise, you have to do it very early. This means you have to be very prepared. This means you have to stop and wait for them to attack you so you can be ready. Given that I successfully parried relatively few attacks that means a slow and boring fight. Personally I found it much easier not to bother, and just whack at them with my sword. You get hurt less than the failed parries do anyway.

You can similarly "reflect" the spells of magic users. It's a nice idea, but it means standing still and waiting for them to shoot you. Just running past them and twatting them with your sword works heaps better.

After a bunch of fighting you trigger another cut scene. This one isn't bad, actually. There's a dragon in it. I like dragons. Tyris runs up past a bunch of her order, who apparently worship Sideboob and haven't gotten the message that their sisters are being butchered. If Tyris is part of this order why is she dressed so differently from everyone else there? Who the hell is she and what is she doing there. Apparently it's to nag the The Great Dragon (seriously, he's called that) for magical powers. Which he gives her to shut her up, then gets speared by a bunch of giant orcs who snuck up behind Tyra.

Tyris fights back and just as one of the Sideboob Sisterhood (who is in frame ONLY as closeup sideboob) is about to die in comes Gimli! OMG!

Ok, it's not Gimli, but it might as well be. It's Gilius Thunderhead of the original game. He saves Sideboob and says to your stupid bint to look out behind her, but she doesn't and gets knocked out.

Unfortunately that's not the end of the game, and Tyra wakes up. You continue to fight for a bit. There's not much to say about that. The fighting doesn't get any better with more combatants involved. Parrying is now rendered utterly useless, as three opponents hit you blue, blue and orange, meaning you parry one hit and then get smacked twice. Suckful.

Some more fighting continues. Oh! And beast riding! You get to ride beasts. The beast riding thing means that you can walk up to certain glowing portals and a beast will come out of them. This is a kind of lame mechanic. It would make more sense if the beast was there but in a cage or something. Anyway, the beasts themselves I've seen two types. One is a lizard chicken thing that breathes fire. It breathes fire and does a kind of tail sweep. Yeah, you know the one. X & Square also lobs a bomb which goes too far to be useful. It walks extremely slowly, but can run at a decent sprint. The animation for the actual beast is ok, with some exceptions. One is jumping. When the animal jumps it lands in an incredibly lame and stilted fashion. It's clumsy, and quite pathetic. And when you're running there's no difference of attack. Using your attacks stops you mid-stride and performs that animation. Some sort of "charge" would have been nice.

The other beast is more interesting. It's a big cat like thing, rather well modelled. It has two attacks, a pounce and a stealth. Stealth lets you either wander past enemies, or (more likely) sneak up to them and tear them apart with a well timed pounce. It's actually quite fun playing on that beast, running around, leaping on things and cutting them apart.

It must be for that reason that the developers opted to stop you doing it. Attacking with the beasts, or doing anything else beyond walking, uses up your beast's health. Seriously. So you've got a very limited time with each beast, and then it goes away permanently.

The game might be called Golden Axe: Beast Rider, but you actually spend very little time riding a beast.

So I quit playing for the evening. I was tired, and it was bed time. I'd been ignoring my lovely girlfriend to play a bad game, and that's unwise by any standard. Is it a good sign that I was relieved to stop playing?

10:06pm, Tuesday October 28th

There's a lot of stuff that's remarkably poorly explained. They stole the dragon, and that's fair enough. Obviously they needed to use its power to raise an army of undead. Or possibly build a device with the power to destroy the planet. Or just... dragon! AWESOME!

But then there was a cutscene and a fight and now I'm on a quest. What am I doing on this quest? Am I trying to find Death Adder (he's between the couch cushions) and kill him for his horribleness? Am I trying to rescue the dragon? Am I trying to find a pair of pants that doesn't show my arse? What's the freaking quest here?

After a big of a fight just before I took a teleport thing, going from a drab greyish world to a drab greyish-brown world (diverse!) and was "treated" to a cut scene. The cut scene, however, i was in different clothes to what I was wearing when I got into the teleport. They've got that drawer thing from the Goodies inside the teleporter!

The cut scene was my reunion with Gimli, who proceeds to pull an axe out of his shoulder that's buried so deeply it's almost certainly severed the brachial artery and sheared through the clavicle. Instead of seeking urgent medical attention he starts off by saying, and I quote and I'm not making this up for a joke "By my balls, girl, you're alive!"

By my balls. I need to use that in conversation. Not just in extreme circumstances, either. "By my balls, I'll have the Fillet o Fish! And a chocolate sundae."

Gimli, obviously using the moments before his death to try to make time with the pretty boobs in front of him, makes up some stuff about a Golden Axe, slightly advancing the "story".

I'd like to think that after she turns away he falls down dead from his massive bloodloss, but I suspect in a game that can't get the main character's walking to look natural they don't have that big a nod to anatomy.

11:18pm, Thursday October 30th

I came home today and Yug was playing GABR. He'd heard me complaining about it and was curious if it was really as bad as I said. He agreed that it was. He started a new game and sat through the same inane tutorials that I had. The thing that he noted as particularly bad was that when riding one beast, using its attack makes you face backwards afterwards. I hadn't noticed that. He's right. It does. Not even directly backwards. Kind of like 7 o'clock. And of course it turns like a truck, so you can't get back to fighting in any hurry. So crappy.

He got sick of it, and having the luxury of NOT reviewing it went away.

I figured what the hell, I'd jump back into my game.

Guess what? I didn't have one any more.

By starting a new game, Yug had actually wiped mine. All of the time I put into the game is gone. I don't blame Yug for this. I blame the game itself. What retarded game doesn't allow you to play with two different people? What modern game offers a single slot for play?

What fucking moron decided there didn't need to be a warning that you were wiping all your fucking progress?

So. What now? Do I press on, starting again from scratch? Or do I concede, admit defeat, and not review it.

I continued. I raced through the early levels, doing everything as fast as possible, and after a few hours got to where I was.

Riding another beast. There's a theme here.

9:24pm, Tuesday November 4th

I've been playing tonight. I went through some new sections. Combat has gotten so hard that you actually need to be on a beast to survive. The enemies are pretty much all boss characters, and there's simply too many of them to fight on foot.

There have been a few new beasts, bigger ones, and quite powerful.

I spent quite a few hours playing through new levels. I have to admit that we're finally starting to see a tiny bit of variety in the level design. It's like the level designer chucked a tanty and they let him do something that wasn't linear.

Speaking of linear, it's quite stunning just how linear the game is to now. I don't mean "you can only go in one way". I mean it's a single fucking line. Think of a maze, where you have to go from one side of the maze to the other. Now in every dead end and wrong turn put a switch you need to press to go the correct path. Make that switch spawn monsters. That's literally Golden Axe's level design.

The latest level is not so linear. You have a few options, a few different places you can go.

And for the last half an hour I've been trying to figure out where the hell I'm supposed to be going. And I've come to a conclusion.

Fuck this shit. I'm out.

This game was bad enough to make me question and consider our review practises. Who are we writing reviews for? For the distributor? Or for the readers? I've always felt that we should always be writing for the reader, we are advocates of the gamers of Australia, not the publishers.

But sometimes we probably get the balance wrong. This review should have gone up earlier. It should have been a warning to potential purchasers. It has always been a matter of policy that we play a game all the way through before reviewing it.

We play a game all the way through because we feel the game deserves the benefit of the doubt, that it should be completed entirely and reviewed in full.

But in this case it's been awfully hard to do so. Play Golden Axe: Beast Rider, or play LittleBigPlanet? Play Golden Axe: Beast Rider, or play FarCry 2? Pretty easy decisions. Play Golden Axe: Beast Rider, or drink fresh urine? Slightly harder decision.

We give the game the benefit of the doubt, but we also have an obligation to our readers. They should be told about this sort of thing, and that responsibility outweighs any benefit of the doubt Golden Axe: Beast Rider deserves.

The game sucks. It sucked from the beginning and at about 3/4 of the way through it still fucking sucks. I've gotten better at the combat, and hate it less than I did, but that just means I've built up a resistance to it, like a recurring infection.

So fuck it. I'm not playing any more of this egregious shit. There are better games to play, and frankly better games to review. It's possible I'll be doing the game a disservice because the last bit is the best game ever. But I'll take that risk.

Golden Axe: Beast Rider came out at a time when there was absolutely no reason to buy it or play it.

One of her less attractive outfits

As a last note there is the opinion of Dave Halverson, a magazine writer at Play. He had a lot to say, some of which I'll quote here.

Regarding many of the “reviews” on Sega’s Golden Axe: Beast Rider: Be wary. The majority of these people (can’t call them critics) either didn’t complete a fraction of the game, don’t understand game design, or just plain suck at games.

If you didn't like the game then it's because YOU suck. Not because the game sucks. Interesting.

The character designs are the polar opposite of Heavenly Sword's decidedly ornate and flamboyant combatants. Beast Rider’s are primitive to say the least and segue into decidedly dark depths Heavenly doesn’t probe...

I would never have said they were. They're just both... scantily clad chicks in an action game. That hardly makes Golden Axe Beast Rider anything like Heavenly Sword, or at least not more so than a thousand other games. The issue I wanted to point out was the suggestion that there are "decidedly dark depths". I think that suggests a level of depth to the game and the character that simply aren't there. She's a woman. She hits things with a sword. End of story.

The beast models seem almost alive with skin actually stretching over bone and more detail than any other creatures you have or will ever use as a means of attack.

MORE DETAIL THAN YOU WILL EVER USE?! Jesus fucking christ. He's predicting the future of games. And put Golden Axe Beast Rider at its peak!

The video game “press” that once was is greatly diminished in this country and game publishers criteria for sending out preview and review code is in need of a complete overhaul.

Oooh, quotes. How very "clever"! While I don't disagree in principle with the question of who should and shouldn't get review code I would think that was more a decision for the publishers than the press. If they want to send it out to every website and blog in the world why shouldn't they? It's just more exposure for their title. That also benefits the public by providing a wider range of opinions. Or perhaps this attitude is merely the souring grapes of a stalwart of a magazine industry that knows fully well it's lost its relevance and wants to have a hissy-fit?

Any review conducted at a “review event” should be noted and they are becoming more and more prevalent (we don’t and will not base reviews on a game we played at a kiosk in a room full of media and PR.

No, such things are clearly not appropriate, and I feel that when factors influence the score of a game they should be clearly stated, such as incomplete playtime, or boffing the PR chick for the company.

But to score Beast Rider below a 7 is just irresponsible.

Ok, seriously, I have to take umbrage with this. Irresponsible to have a different opinion to yours? Irresponsible to call a spade a spade? We don't do scores, but if we did it would probably get a 3 or 4. Because that's all it deserves.

Once upon a time to work as a game journalist at a magazine (before online) you had to be so exalted a gamer that you deserved the right to tell gamers what to buy.... Do these people have a right to their opinion? Of course; it’s whether or not they should have the right to affect yours that’s in question.

While there are interesting questions to be asked about whose opinions have validity and whose don't I think the key is to trust the reading public. People know who they like, and who they don't like. People know reviewers. It might not seem like they do, but they do. Especially a site like AustralianGamer, where we focus as much on the person as the game. Regardless, this again seems like the bittered rantings of an industry losing its way.

Mr Halverson,

I don't know how you are. I don't care. You don't know who I am and you don't care either.

I doubt you'll ever read this review but here you go: when one person has an opinion that differs from the overwhelming concensus of the reviewing media there are two options. Either you're wrong and everyone else is right, or you're right, and everyone else is wrong.

It takes a collossal level of arrogance to assume the latter. Arrogance is one option anyway. The other, of course, is more sinister. Defending your opinion is one thing, but the level of challenge presented here is actually so strong it smells suspicious.

Long story short, Mr Halverson, there's only two ways you could write what you wrote. You're either corrupt and doing your readers a disservice or you're completely fucking stupid. I'll let you pick.

To the readers, the gamers, the people that matter, here's the real scoop. Simple, straight, and clear - Golden Axe: Beast Rider is shit.

Pros

Kind of fun, I guess. At times. Boobs and blood. If that's your thing. Adequate graphics.

Cons

Please see review above. Bad level design, dodgy animation, bad combat system. Seriously, do I have to list it all?