Gauntlet and I go back a long way. When I was young, it didn’t matter what other games were in the arcade, if there was a Gauntlet machine, I was there. In fact, some friends of the family somehow acquired a Gauntlet II machine when I was ten or eleven, and that was as close to heaven as my young brain could comprehend. I mean, Gauntlet II with unlimited life? What gets better than that, I ask you?
More recent attempts to revive the Gauntlet franchise haven’t been quite as enchanting. One Gauntlet Legends machine in the student center where I went to college captured my attention (and about $75 of my college bank account) more or less due to nostalgia, though the RPG elements that were added did breathe some new life into the franchise. Unfortunately, the console ports didn’t quite capture the same magic as the arcade version, and the sequel, Dark Legacy, was just more of the same.
That said, I had mixed feelings about Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows when it was first announced. On one hand, Midway’s been notorious about slapping together sequels for their franchises to do as little as possible to separate gamers from their money. On the other, the designers, after originally deciding to delve deeper into a very sophisticated Action-RPG system, promised instead to get back to the series’ roots. In other words, Seven Sorrows would provide the simple, addictive gameplay that the original arcade game provided.
Well, to put it bluntly, Seven Sorrows is very similar to what the original Gauntlet would have been, if it was boring, short, and basically pointless.
One obvious similarity that both the original Gauntlet and Seven Sorrows have is that neither has any plot whatsoever. Now, the original Gauntlet had no story by design; Seven Sorrows, on the other hand, attempts to present a story, but it’s barely there and fairly difficult to follow. Apparently, the narrator did some bad stuff, and his Seven Sorrows have something to do with the fact that he caused the heroes’ deaths, and trusted his six advisors, who are also fairly evil. So to correct his Seven Sorrows, he raises the heroes from the dead, and sends them to kill his six advisors so that he can rest in peace. The story is advanced through cut scenes between levels, but that’s it; nothing that happens in the levels does anything to trigger a cut scene or otherwise move the story along.
Of course, you don’t come to Gauntlet for the engaging story; you come for the hacking and slashing. There are both in great abundance, though, unfortunately, that’s about all there is. The general idea is that you enter a stage, and then you fight your way through hordes of monsters, usually created by generators that can be destroyed, until you reach the next checkpoint or the end of the level. Occasionally, you’ll need to find a key to open a door, or need to pull a series of switches to proceed, but both are easily accessible without too much searching.
In fact, that’s the biggest problem with Seven Sorrows: The levels are painfully linear. I only got really stuck once, and that was because part of the path was obscured by objects in the foreground. Part of the fun of Gauntlet is wandering around in search of the exit, or, better yet, the door that will let you skip ahead to the later levels. There is none of that in Seven Sorrows; it’s often extremely obvious where to go, and the only thing stopping you is the mob of monsters in the way.
What’s more, the combat system is extremely dumbed down as well. The primary attack in every other Gauntlet game, which is the ranged weaponry (the warrior’s axe, the elf’s arrows, etc.), is relegated to a secondary method of attack; you can get through most of the game without ever knowing it was available. Most of your attacking will be done hand-to-hand. To the game’s credit, there are a number of combo attacks that can be purchased with gold that is collected along the way. Of course, there is never a situation where the combos are really necessary; you can just button mash your way through the game and not have any trouble whatsoever. The only buttons other than A (primary attack) that are even remotely useful in combat are X, which knocks armored foes’ shields away, and the black button, which performs a magical blast that clears out all the enemies nearby (and takes out Death when he appears). I was able to get through even the last levels of the game by just alternating X and A for the armored monsters, and just A for everything else.
There are some basic RPG elements, but they’re subtle enough to barely be worth bothering with. Killing enough enemies provides one or more points that can be used to increase your character’s rating in damage, health, or mana regeneration. I never really noticed any significant improvement after upgrading any of these characteristics, but even if you could, because monsters continuously come at you until you destroy their generators, you could theoretically just stand in the first area on level one and just kill monsters for a couple of hours until you leveled up as far as you could go. Add to that the fact that you can easily buy everything that you can buy with gold to upgrade your character by halfway through the game, and it really raises the question of why the designers chose to leave these elements in the game in the first place.
Even the boss battles are disappointing. There are six bosses, and they are fairly similar other than the final boss. Basically, other than the occasional twist (like the golem who is defeated by killing the sorcerers who keep him alive), all the bosses can be defeated by standing in front of them, holding L to block when they attack, then whale on them with A until they rear up to attack instead. The final boss is even more disappointing, in that he’s just another stage with some extra hazards, and you need to pull four series of switches while fighting off normal monsters in order to defeat him. I can honestly say that Seven Sorrows’ boss is easily one of the easiest final bosses I’ve encountered in any game that I’ve played in quite a while.
To add insult to injury, the game isn’t even all that long. I was able to complete the game from start to finish in roughly five hours, and I was shocked every time I would load up the game and see that I’d completed another 25% of the game. So, unfortunately, even if you like mindless hack and slash action (and there are certainly times that one wishes to shut off one’s brain and just bring death and destruction to thousands of mindless drones), there’s simply not enough of it for the $50 price tag.
Graphically, Seven Sorrows is adequate, but not outstanding. There’s nothing wrong with the game technically; I only noticed one or two instances of clipping, and even with several dozen enemies on the screen, I never noticed any slowdown. The problem, rather, is that the game just plain doesn’t look good. The enemies fall into a half dozen or so categories that look alike, and the scenery is uninspiring. Also, the characters are extremely easy to lose on the screen, especially given that they don’t have a color-coded circle around their feet to locate them, like other games like Champions of Norrath and Dungeons and Dragons Heroes. There’s nothing really wrong with the graphics, per se, but given what the Xbox is capable of, and that there really isn’t a lot to the gameplay, one would expect it to at least look nice.
The sound is equally unimpressive. The standard Gauntlet announcer returns, but speaks with something more of an accent than he used to; one line where this shows in particular is where he announces Death’s appearance, but it comes out like “Death has a beard.” He’s also off on his timing; he announces that your character needs food badly when your life meter is half full, and that you have died when your corpse has been rotting for several seconds, so he’s not nearly as useful as he used to be in the original game. The music and sound effects are there, and they’re non-intrusive, so much so that none of them made an impression on me. They’re clearly not bad, but you won’t miss much if you hit the mute button, either.
Simply put, Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows is a game that attempts to capture the charm of the original Gauntlet games by simplifying the gameplay, but unfortunately, it does too good of a job in simplifying the game to the point where it’s barely worth playing. Normally, I can have a good time with a multiplayer hack and slash game regardless of how minimalist the gameplay is, but Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows takes away so much that playing the game just seems pointless, and it’s over before it can even be classified as mindless fun. At the end of the day, Gauntlet may have seven sorrows, but I only have one: that Midway allowed this great franchise to deteriorate to this point.
