Written by: Stoo
Date posted: January 1, 2010

In over eight years of reviews, we’d not until recently looked at any beat-em-ups, or other such games based on the noble art of people punching each other a lot. Not until Rik reviewed One Must Fall, anyway. That’s mostly because, on the PC, there haven’t been many games worth commenting on in the first place. If you’re thinking back to the early-mid 1990s days of Chun-Li and her epic thighs kicking people in the head, or muscular heroes prowling around the mean streets beating up hoodlums, odds are good that your fondest memories come from the 16 bit consoles.

The PC just wasn’t taken too seriously as a platform for such things. One reason being that if you were playing with a friend then you wanted to be using proper controllers, and sat comfortably on the couch in front of a decent sized TV. Hunching in front of a small monitor with one of you on a 2-button joystick and the other on keyboard, the likely PC setup of the early 90s, was rather less appealing.

There was a fairly meagre crop of home-grown PC efforts, OMF probably being the best. Otherwise, especially at the start of the 90s, we had to fill the gap with ports of games that mostly originated in the arcades then moved to consoles. These ports could often be a bit half-arsed, with sub-par graphics or sound, or clunky handling. I recall Street Fighter 2 for example being poorly received. Still, they weren’t always completely unplayable. So today we’re looking at one of the better examples, the famous Golden Axe from Sega.

As you probably remember these fighting-based games came in two flavours. A bit of research (well 2 minutes on Wikipedia) tells me there are naming conventions that are widespread, although not totally fixed. On the one hand you have the one-on-one match-based games where two combatants fight it out until one is knocked out – such as OMF. These are apparently the ones we should call “fighting games”. Golden Axe however is a “beat-’em up” –  you fight through scrolling levels full of enemies, with an isometric view and a pseudo-3d effect to levels (ie you can walk in two dimensions and also jump).

 

The game began life in the arcades, while Sega’s Megadrive received boasted the definitive home version. While most beat ’em ups went for a gritty urban theme, this one stood out for its Conan the Barbarian style fantasy setting. So instead of some dude in a karate outfit or an angry cop, you choose one of three sword-and-axe wielding heroes. There’s a barbarian guy (blue underpants), barbarian chick (red bikini) and a Dwarf (extremely short tunic, no trousers). Meanwhile the locations are castles, villages and a few rather cool fantasy concepts like a town on the back of a giant turtle.

It’s all pretty easy to pick up and the range of moves isn’t particularly extensive. You have your basic slash, jumping attack, a running kick\headbutt and then bodily throwing enemies. There should be a second jumping attack also , a kind of downwards stab, but it seems to have been removed from this version.

Close quarters fighting can seem a bit punishing sometimes, with you being beaten down onto your knees and several bars of health being knocked off by common enemies while you’re defenceless. Some reviews suggest it wasn’t that bad on other systems. Still it’s not unmanageable. You might just have to use the running attacks a lot.

There’s one more cool feature you encounter a few minutes in – small dragons that you can ride. These come in three varieties: one has a tail swipe with longer reach than your own weapon, another breathes a jet of flame, while the best ones launch a fireball right across the screen. They always appear ridden by an enemy; you can knock the rider off and leap on to take control, but enemies can in turn knock you off and reclaim their mount. If the poor creature loses its rider enough times, it will get fed up and run away. However if you can hold onto the dragon, its powerful attacks help you dominate a fight.

Another memorable feature is magic; you pick up little blue potions by kicking gnomes(!) and these are used to charge up your powers. When unleashed there’s a fancy graphical effect and everyone goes flying. So it can serve as both a hefty extra punch against bosses and just a general purpose panic button. It’s also part of what differentiates the three heroes: Bikini chick can build her magic up to the highest levels but is the weakest at regular fighting due to low weapon reach. The Dwarf is the other way around, and bluepants the barbarian is predictably in-between.

 

Graphically it can’t be faulted for a game of this vintage. The sprites and backgrounds, usingVGA are crisp and effective in setting the scene. It also looks to be on a par with the Megadrive version. The audio side doesn’t fare so well – the jangly adlib-card music is acceptable, but the sound effects sound rather tortured. As I recall they were somehow squeezed out of the PC’s internal bleeper (now simulated by Dosbox), as adlib couldn’t do digitised effects.

So overall, there’s definitely still some oldskool fun on offer. Even if it does come down to charge, kick, slash a lot. There’s a cheerful simplicity to jumping back nearly 2 decades and hitting skeletons with an axe until they fall down. However, I’ve mentioned a few annoyances in the PC version, and there are a couple more that suggest file sizes were cut down to fit the game on a single floppy. Like, each hero has only one graphical effect for their magic, whereas originally it varied according to the strength of the attack. Also the ending sequences were drastically cut down.

So if you want the optimum experience of revisiting this old beat’em up, this isn’t the port you want. You’re better off with the arcade or megadrive versions, easy to find nowadays on modern consoles. On the other hand, if you’re a die-hard DOS loyalist this is far from unplayable, and you can always plug in two USB joysticks, connect to a big TV and enjoy some fighting camaradarie with a friend.