Golden Axe: Beast Rider

As an obligatory introduction, I want to say these reviews will be perfect in every way, giving an unbiased and universally understandable conclusion. This is probably not how it will turn out. I only promise to give my own opinion, and share my experiences while playing through these games. You have been warned!

Now, on with my first game review! Today, I will be talking about the latest in the Golden Axe series, Golden Axe: Beast Rider for the PS3. I will begin by saying that almost every aspect of Beast Rider irks me. The battle system is simplistic at best, the controls are clunky and often sluggish, and the graphics are less than mediocre. The story is developed only as far as it needs to in order to give you an understandable objective. I dont know how long they spent in development, but it clearly was not nearly long enough.

You might think a simple battle system could be nice since it would be easier to learn, right? Sorry, not in this case. You have three basic attacks at your disposal. There is a quick attack, a slow power attack, and a knockback move. They can be chained together with some decent timing to make fairly powerful combo attacks. The enemies also have three special attacks for you to contend with. One attack makes their weapon glow orange, and must be dodged. Another causes their weapon to glow blue, and needs to be blocked. The third causes their weapon to glow green, and can be either blocked or dodged. Some enemies have a fourth attack that glows a color which is virtually indistinguishable from the orange attacks, and cannot be blocked or dodged. In order to dodge it, you need to jump. Despite being a fairly simple fighting scheme, it becomes increasingly frustrating as you constantly get overwhelmed by numerous enemies, and you cannot possibly dodge/block all their attacks.

The controls also suffer from a similar lack of quality. Blocking especially has a slight delay before your block takes effect, and lasts mere moments. Good timing is required to successfully block an attack from a single enemy, let alone half a dozen at once. Couple this with an infuriatingly squiggly camera control, and it makes for some very difficult fights. Top it off with their clunky aiming interface when throwing the golden axe to break statues (a rather gimmicky attempt at gameplay depth, if you ask me) and you have yourself a game that is nigh indistinguishable from the myriad of rushed movies-turned-videogames on the market.

In my opinion the graphics are one of the least important part of a game. If it has solid gameplay and a decent plotline, it has plenty of entertainment potential even if its graphics are subpar. Golden Axe: Beast Rider has neither solid gameplay nor a great plot, and the graphics are subpar for the PS3 to boot. In fact, the finely rendered cutscenes are about what one could expect from a higher end retail game, and the actual game graphics are several notches down on the eyecandy scale. A game can be excused for having one of these three elements be of low quality, but when all three are lacking, you might wonder whether the development team was taking any pride in their work at all.