Console: PS3
Date Released: 11-30-1990Date Reviewed: 6-05-2012 Reviewer: Rob Pros * One of the best hack-n-slash games for the Sega Genesis
* Easy to play but challenging to win.
* One of the better soundtracks for a Sega Genesis game Cons *Combat can get glitchy at times and you might get stuck between two bad guys who lock you in a kneeling position and completely waste your life
* Bosses can be a bit overpowered and easily kill you if you make the wrong choices. Golden Axe is a high fantasy story in which you are the hero trying to save the world from the Evil Death Adder who has captured the King and Princess, as well as possessing the mighty Golden Axe. You must travel through the realm fighting Death Adder’s minions to finally make it to the castle to confront Death Adder himself. You can choose between three heroes. The Axe wielding dwarf, Gilius Thunderhead, the sword wielding barbarian, Ax Battler, and the sword wielding amazon, Tyris Flare. Presentation : A Graphics / Animation / Sound The Graphics for Golden Axe were definitely good for its time. I mean the whole point of the Sega Genesis console was to bring the Arcade home with you. They did a decent job in bringing Golden Axe in as it was an Arcade game with great graphics for its time and fun gameplay. But just like every system from those days, it didn’t quite have the graphics engine to keep up so they had to water down the graphics a bit, but they were still great and Golden Axe isn’t the only one to have done this. There are many Arcade ports and remakes for home console especially Sega Genesis, of course the most well-known is Mortal Kombat but there are quite a few others. The animations to this game are fine but felt a little bit restricted, swinging your weapons around really didn’t do you as much good unless you where the dwarf, the best bet was to do a rush attack to the enemy since they really didn’t have a good defense for this. It didn’t do as much damage but it got the job done. Now the Animations for the magic abilities are awesome and if you can be patient enough to get Tyris’s magic all the way full, she can summon a dragon who does a ton of damage to anything on the screen. The lightning animations for some of Gilius’s spells look really cool to. There are some downsides to the way the game is set up though, it is a 2D/3D game much like the old Nintendo classic Double Dragon. And some of the same issues your find in that game you find in this one, unless bad guys are standing right in front of you or right next to you, your attacks won’t hit, and you can easily get double teamed with an enemy on each side hitting you over and over. Golden Axe especially has an issue with this as when you get hit you fall to your knees and can’t get back up until someone does a throw or a finishing combo on you, this can get you stuck in an infinite loop where both enemies keep hitting you but never finish you off so you are stuck until your life bar is depleted and you lose a life. This is probably the most annoying glitch in the game and probably one of the few you’ll run across. Now as for the sound track of this game, I’ll admit that the Sega Genesis has never been known for its sound quality. From what I understand they didn’t do to well in putting in a decent sound card into the system and it causes the games to not sound better than those you would find on an 8-bit console, but what they were able to do with such a restricted audio board was amazing in Golden Axe. The wilderness song of the first level was very inspiring and I can listen to it over and over. It just seems to pump you up into playing through that stage. The rest of the soundtrack definitely sets a good mood on each stage. Of course you still can’t compare this soundtrack to those of game like Flashback or Sonic the Hedgehog but it was still fun to listen to. The screams of people when they die is hilarious to listen to. Single Player : A Game mechanics / Length / difficulty The Game was designed fairly well, with plenty of gaps and holes for you to jump over and the enemies are not the most intelligent but can still be fairly difficult at times, especially those stupid skeletons! Single player mode is really fun, it allows you to play through the game on your own and kill hordes of minions on your way to the final boss Death Adder. I have noticed that the game does tone things down a bit for you in single player mode, so there is no worry about never beating the game without a partner, but I’ll admit that this is a very challenging game when you get through the first few levels.
The length of this game is actually pretty long for an arcade game, you can expect to fight your way through for a couple of hours if you play it on normal mode. Now if you play easy mode you actually are only allowed to make it to the castle and then it tells you to play through normal to actually fight Death Adder, in which you must start the whole game over. So unless you are really new at this game I would never suggest playing easy because you’ll just get mad when this happens. There are at least 6 Levels to play through and all of them increase in difficulty quite a bit from each other, with less magic drops or gnome guys to kill, and you eventually run across larger gaps that you can easily be knocked into or fall in so you must be careful, although there is something satisfying about throwing an enemy over a ledge.
Multiplayer : B
Game mechanics / features / Online features
Golden Axe’s multiplayer is more of an arcade mode than anything else. While you are playing single player a person may press start on the second controller and join in whenever they want, they then choose from the remaining two characters and begin to battle with you. Now the game does recognize when there are two players playing and will add some more enemies if necessary but you probably won’t see the change until the next level. There really isn’t much more to multiplayer than that but what do you expect from a system that didn’t have online support yet? But there was a vs. mode in which you could beat up on your buddy with which ever character you liked but if you really want to play a good vs game you look for Mortal Kombat, not Golden Axe.
Replay Value : A
Lasting appeal / Bonus Content / DLC
This game is a lot of fun and for replay value it is pretty high for a Sega Genesis game. Much like Sonic the Hedgehog, the game has great tunes and is a lot of fun to play, it was a great way to blow off some steam when you came home from school, and of course if you didn’t have a computer that could play doom, it was a great beat’em up game to take its place. Even though the story doesn’t change and the levels don’t randomly spawn, this game had some good replay value for its time.
Overall : A
