Oh Golden Axe, how I have a love/hate relationship with you. I loved how meta your ending was back in the day, yet I hated your boring, repetitive gameplay. And don't even get me started on how those terrible sequels, one of which was so bad that Sega never even released it in the U.S. Yet part of me gets excited every time I hear that they are resurrecting this classic franchise for the 21st century. Well, as of today I will no longer get excited.
While playing this brand new Golden Axe (available on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3) a Sega representative informed me that the game was scheduled for a September release. Judging from the horrific showing this game had at E3, I'm starting to wonder if I heard him wrong and he actually meant that it was coming out September of next year. The game suffered from frame rate problems, missing cinemas, weird glitches and, worst of all, a complete lack of polish.
The problem with this game is that it really doesn't feel much like the classic Golden Axe games. That is, it's a single-player title (no two-player mode here) and you only play as one of the characters (the scantly clad female warrior from the original game). She has a few different moves, but for the most part you're just mashing buttons and killing enemies in increasingly gruesome ways.
That's not to say that this game doesn't have a few throwbacks to the older Golden Axe games. Death Adder is apparently the main bad guy in this game, it features gnomes and you can ride all sorts of crazy lizard-like creatures. Outside of that it's basically you running into different rooms (or closed off arenas) and battling a set number of bad guys. Kill them and do it again, over and over and over again. Couple that with a number of nagging control issues, no multiplayer and some bizarre visual problems and you have the recipe for a terrible, terrible game. Then again, this game is no worse than any of the Golden Axe sequels. Better luck next time, Sega.
