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IGN Review of Golden Axe: Beast Rider
If had to sum up my feelings for Golden Axe: Beast Rider in five words or less, I'd actually do it in one: hatred. The game is so ridden with poor production values that there's absolutely nothing redeeming about the game, and its checklist of annoying issues will drive all but the already-insane crazy long before it ends.
Where do I start? Firstly, the combat is terrible. Your move set is very basic and doesn't have anything close to the depth of options that you'll find in franchises like God of War or Devil May Cry, or even far lesser titles for that matter. Slashing away at your two main attack buttons results in very few combo options, and there's not a whole lot of variance here. Aside from the upper-cut slash or kicking options, they all do pretty much the same thing.
While that's just boring, the defensive maneuvers at your disposal are excruciatingly annoying. On one shoulder button you have dodge, and on the other you have parry. When the enemy's attack glows orange, you have to dodge, and when it's blue, you're supposed to parry it. The dodge works as expected - as soon as you hit the button, you're out of the way and able to unleash a counter.
The parry, on the other hand, is terrible. Rather than immediately snapping to the parry so that it instantly works, Tyris goes into an animation to parry, which results in a delay. This might be OK (but sluggish) if she stayed in the blocking pose, but she doesn't and instead immediately drops her sword again. The result is that you have to perfectly time when you press the parry button to match the forthcoming hit of your opponent, but not too early and not too late. Even just getting through the tutorial section that requires you to do this a number of times shows how frustrating it'll be later on.
And oh boy does it get frustrating. But the poor parry system isn't the only reason. Only a few enemies will be on-screen at any one time, but more will continuously respawn as you kill others. Some of them will fire at you from off-screen, and oftentimes you'll have guys firing at you from both sides of an area. I'm not sure how they didn't figure this one out before, but I'm pretty sure everyone else in the industry knows that getting shot in the back is not fun.
It's also not fun to get hit when you're down, but that happens too. Oh, and having to throw the Golden Axe at beacons and statues (with an extremely clunky aiming system) while you're being attacked isn't fun either.
The environments that you'll fight in are pretty damn boring. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to the storyline, and the way the game changes scenery on you is that it forces you to teleport to another section of the world. Why you go from place-to-place and why you don't just teleport to the ending is somewhat beyond me, though it's probably explained somewhere in the nonsensical storyline that lost me about 30 seconds into the experience.
The game's namesake, riding beasts, doesn't even work all that well. Each of the creatures has different abilities to make them unique, but they all have problems. The controls are sluggish, so turning them around can be a pain, and you can get caught up in groups easily and knocked off your ride if you're not extra careful. Some of the attack radiuses are way smaller than they should be so you don't actually hit people standing right there, and they just aren't fun on the whole.
©2008-10-16, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Where do I start? Firstly, the combat is terrible. Your move set is very basic and doesn't have anything close to the depth of options that you'll find in franchises like God of War or Devil May Cry, or even far lesser titles for that matter. Slashing away at your two main attack buttons results in very few combo options, and there's not a whole lot of variance here. Aside from the upper-cut slash or kicking options, they all do pretty much the same thing.
While that's just boring, the defensive maneuvers at your disposal are excruciatingly annoying. On one shoulder button you have dodge, and on the other you have parry. When the enemy's attack glows orange, you have to dodge, and when it's blue, you're supposed to parry it. The dodge works as expected - as soon as you hit the button, you're out of the way and able to unleash a counter.
The parry, on the other hand, is terrible. Rather than immediately snapping to the parry so that it instantly works, Tyris goes into an animation to parry, which results in a delay. This might be OK (but sluggish) if she stayed in the blocking pose, but she doesn't and instead immediately drops her sword again. The result is that you have to perfectly time when you press the parry button to match the forthcoming hit of your opponent, but not too early and not too late. Even just getting through the tutorial section that requires you to do this a number of times shows how frustrating it'll be later on.
And oh boy does it get frustrating. But the poor parry system isn't the only reason. Only a few enemies will be on-screen at any one time, but more will continuously respawn as you kill others. Some of them will fire at you from off-screen, and oftentimes you'll have guys firing at you from both sides of an area. I'm not sure how they didn't figure this one out before, but I'm pretty sure everyone else in the industry knows that getting shot in the back is not fun.
It's also not fun to get hit when you're down, but that happens too. Oh, and having to throw the Golden Axe at beacons and statues (with an extremely clunky aiming system) while you're being attacked isn't fun either.
The environments that you'll fight in are pretty damn boring. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to the storyline, and the way the game changes scenery on you is that it forces you to teleport to another section of the world. Why you go from place-to-place and why you don't just teleport to the ending is somewhat beyond me, though it's probably explained somewhere in the nonsensical storyline that lost me about 30 seconds into the experience.
The game's namesake, riding beasts, doesn't even work all that well. Each of the creatures has different abilities to make them unique, but they all have problems. The controls are sluggish, so turning them around can be a pain, and you can get caught up in groups easily and knocked off your ride if you're not extra careful. Some of the attack radiuses are way smaller than they should be so you don't actually hit people standing right there, and they just aren't fun on the whole.
©2008-10-16, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved