Friday 20 February 2015

Gauntlet

This top down, four player co-op game sees a party of adventurers entering the titular Gauntlet of some really bored yet powerful being who enjoys watching blood sport. At least he's nice enough to leave a ton of gold and food (health) lying around as incentive to push forward into danger that scales slightly and has maps that also alter a tiny bit to keep you on your toes. Said gold is automatically shared among the party, regardless of who picks it up, which is a good system for co-op stuff. It can then be spent either on fluff items or a small selection of upgradable relics that can help in your adventures.


Those relics tie in to the rather different potion system in this game. Food is health and is consumed (or destroyed) as soon as it is touched. Potions you can carry around but they don't heal you. Instead they let you use the relics you are carrying. Got only one potion? Well, tough you can only use one of your two relics, once. Kinda annoying that you can't trade these sorts of things in game but if you have voice chat going (which I don't think is included in the game - big minus for me) it's easy enough to try organize.

Another thing you might need to organize is who plays what character at the start, as there can be no duplicates and all of them play very differently. I think the Wizard is the most powerful of the four, but is also the most complicated to play with all the spell juggling. He's very handy against the all too frequent "monster spawning stones" that appear though. Death on hard mode and above also requires a Skull Coin to pay for a revival. The only way to gain these is by killing a ton of monsters and since the Skull Coins are shared between the party there might be a lot of downtime for killed members since the levels are kinda on the long side.

Fortunately there are save points after every chapter (3 levels) so it immediately is better than Forced, which plays very similar to this complete with the annoying "shared screen" style. I'd personally prefer closer save points too but what can you do. All up it's a fun game for an already organized group to play. I give it three summoning pillars out of five.

2 comments:

  1. Now I've got "Elf needs food badly!" in my head.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. As my team's resident elf player, I hear that a lot while playing. :P

      Delete