Life Outside PLT1

Gaming: Golden Axe Warrior on Sega Master System

October 8, 2009 on 10:54 pm | In Reviews | | Balinor

No, not the side scroller of fame but the birds eye, top down, action adventure version that maybe a lot of people haven’t heard of released in 1991 called Golden Axe Warrior. A simple way to explain it is, it looks like the original Legend of Zelda on the Nintendo Entertainment System. In fact, I have read from places it was Sega’s way of competing with the NES at the time. If you put a play the games side by side you can see they are nearly identical.

Pros:
Quite colourful and good use of colour.
Music match mood of game.
Easy to pick up and play.

Cons:
Repetitive.
Lack of world map.
Frustrating secrets.
Unimaginative monsters.

I have to say the game was interesting at start but it got quite repetitive really fast and the lack of a proper map system means you have to memorise each location. Which isn’t too bad because you have to walk by the that often anyway. It was nearly the end of the game where you get a device which shows you where you are on a slightly detailed map of the world. In the normal game you only get a rid that with no picture of the world, and a flashing dot to represent where you are. If they had the map device at the start of the game it wouldn’t have been so hard to navigate the world. When designing a game where you have a world. Have a map that show where you are in the world.

The lack of saves in this game was quite annoying, especially when you get into the dungeons. (As we all know, all the action happens in dungeons.) You usually get a save spot somewhere outside and that’s it, if you die in the dungeon you restart back at the beginning of the dungeon. Sure they may not be that big but it was a real hassle as they can be quite hard at times. The lack of saves was actually one thing that made this game a little off putting but they did make it up by letting you ‘continue’.

You can ‘continue’ a few square out (I think) and everything still done (monsters still beaten) for horns (the currency of the game). This isn’t so bad if things aren’t so expensive and collecting horns weren’t so slow. Sometimes it’s not worth it but having to retrack your steps from the save points can also be really frustrating. It is good to be good….at this game.

In the game they try to weave together a story. That’s normal for an action adventure game but the problem is, it’s so detached from what you’re actually doing. There is story then there’s action and nothing in between. When you’re in a town they might say something relating to what you’re doing but that’s it, it was almost like, oh we need to add some dialogue to this game to make it more story-y. A lot of it you just don’t care about and often just skip through but sometimes they actually talk about (may it be very vague) hidden items but because the dialogue was so boring I skipped the important ones. Oh and the secrets…

Secrets are fine in a game. It adds re-playability but it is really frustrating as a player when you have to guess where the important, game finishing critical things are. Often there are no clues so you have to chop at each tree and blow up each boulder in the game to see if there is a secret underneath it. In the end I got so frustrated with this I had to look for a walkthrough with a big world map so I could tell where I was at any given time. It seems like they are trying to increase play time in the game by making you explore every single thing!

To conclude though it was quite the effort Sega put in to compete with Zelda but seeing as there are no more follow up games, it just couldn’t handle the juggernaut that is The Legend of Zelda. Having never played Zelda, it seems to me, in this game, they were sloppy in some of the monster’s AI and design with monsters just having a different colour to indicate toughness. It was entertaining but flawed however back in the day it would of been quite the game to own.