GOLDEN AXE 3 REVIEW - August 1993
| 'Golden Axe 3? Sounds like a fair enough mark to me',
reckons Stuart Campbell. Golden Axe, eh? What a true classic it was. Walk along a bit, hit button 'B' a lot, walk along a bit more, hit button 'B' a lot, walk along another bit, hit button 'B' a few times etc etc. Still, didn't the kids just love it? A huge success in the arcades and on the Mega Drive, it was followed a couple of years later by Golden Axe 2, a sequel which changed the winning formula so little that you'd need one of Patrick Moore's very biggest telescopes to tell the two games apart in a brightly-lit room. Now, oh joy of joys, there's Golden Axe 3. Guess what? Now, the beat-'em-up is probably the second most popular game style on the Mega Drive (after platformers). It's been scientifically proven that six out of ten MD games are in fact beat-'em-ups (by me, with a random selection of ten games, yesterday), so it's a fiercely competitive market. You'd imagine, then, that beat-'em-up designers would be some of the most worried and tired people on the planet, constantly racking their brains and furrowing their brows for new and exciting ways to make their game stand out from the crowd. Golden Axe's designers are no different, and they've come up with an absolute corker of an idea to boot. Can you guess what it is yet? ('Lots of original and innovative concepts?' - Enthusiastic reader, Northants) Nope. ('Astonishing graphics and technical cleverness to distract players' attention from a fairly hackneyed formula?' - Beat-'em-up fan, Swindon) Uh-uh. ('An expensive film licence?' - Bill Obviouslymadeupname, Cheshire) Close, Bill, but no cigar. ('Alright Stu, I give up. What is it?' - Bored of this joke, Aberdeen). Simple. They've put 'Golden Axe' on the box. And, just to ram the point home, they've put Golden Axe IN the box as well. Golden Axe 3 is so exactly-the-same-as-both-the-other-Golden-Axe-games, you simply won't believe it. I still don't. The gameplay is identical - you get a couple of extra characters to choose from at the start, but to all intents and purposes they don't make the slightest bit of difference. The graphics are - well, actually, they're not identical. They're significantly worse than the originals. See for yourself. Soundwise, it's laughable (as long as you haven't paid for it, that is) - the same old grunts and thuds as before, some horribly tedious music, and when a character dies, someone three miles away screams tinnily. You do get a two-player VS mode, but let's face it, Golden Axe doesn't lend itself to being Street Fighter 2. 'Rush up to your opponent and, er, try to press your 'B' button before he does.' No, I don't think so. This must have taken all of a week to write. It takes a bit over an hour to finish on the hardest difficulty level. It takes a somewhat shorter period of time to realise it's one of the biggest piles of old donkey crap ever perpetrated on Mega Drive game players. Don't be an idiot. |
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