Gameplay
You will be glad to know that the 360 Xbox Live Arcade version is a perfect port of the arcade version rather than any of the older SEGA console versions. All the characters are in, all your enemies are present and everything just looks spot on.
Upon starting the game, the player can choose one of three characters and enter the game. Immediately you stumble across a wounded warrior, one of the royal guards who in his last moments tells you that the king and princess have been captured. So you hack and slash your way through Adder’s minions as you travel through the ramshackle towns, through turtle village - which is actually a moving village on the back of a giant turtle! From there you progress onto the back of a giant flying eagle, which drops you off at the castle.
Death Adder’s minions aren’t really too much of a varied bunch. There are your basic grunts - the Longmoan and the Heninger who become harder as your progress through the level. Armed with maces and clubs, each grunt differs in colour to indicate a tougher variant, until you come across the top end ’shadow’ grunts, who materialize out of thin air. There are also lethal skeleton warriors, and these are the most annoying enemy of all to be honest as they are fast and use the lethal death stab manovoure on their foes. There are also amazon females in the game who ride any of the three lethal steeds in the game. Lastly there are the dreaded Hell Knights who tower about Adder’s minions and wield great long swords with a deadly reach.
Did I mention steeds? Called Bizarrians, there are three in the game, which the amazon females tend to use. They can easily be knocked off and the steed commandeered for yourself. There is the Chicken Leg as it is known - a pink creature with a huge tail that can knock virtually any enemy to the ground, and there are two types of dragon, a black one with a straight forward flame blast towards the ground, and a red dragon, which shoots out fireballs. Each of these creatures are ridable and very deadly should you get your hands on one. However if you get knocked off yourself one too many times, they will go wild and run away.
Luckily the three warriors are aided by the fact that they can control the elements with magic. Gilius has lightening at his disposal, Ax has the corruption of earth and Tyris commands all that is fire. Gilius has the weakest magic, with just 3 bars, Ax has 4 bars, and Tyris, who is the weakest fighter, has a huge 6 bars, which results in a huge dragon head coming down from the heavens and toasting every enemy in sight. Magic can be obtained by collecting blue magic pots…and carrying these pots are the little thieves. These guys scurry about the place carrying sacks of pots and it’s your job to hit them so they drop pots! Since they are so quick, it can sometimes be a rather annoying task to do. The thieves normally appear before every boss fight to help you replenish your magic supply. You can use your magic during its lesser powerful early stages if you wish, or just save it up until all bars have been maxed out. The choice is yours.
Each character has the basic hack and slash attack, they can jump and attack too, which is great for the larger foes as approaching them head-on will mostly result in you being thrown through the air. Unique to each character is a special attack that deals a fair amount of damage if performed right. Gilius can perform a backwards roll that hits enemies far behind him. He is largely invulnerable when rolling. Both Ax and Tyris can perform a powerful spin attack that hits enemies directly behind.
The game has a great combination of gameplay elements that may seem normal to today’s gamers, but at the time it was a bit of a revelation. Gamers were used to top down adventure games, not rough isometric 2D side scrollers like this. The co-op element is what made the game so hugely enjoyable and this game sold by the bucket-load when it hit the home formats a year later. The home ports however were nowhere near as good as the originals even though the home versions had a few extra levels and gaming modes.
The moment this title hit Xbox Live Arcade, I purchased it right away. Just 13 minutes later I had completed the game and had all but three of the achievements. Make no mistake; this is a very short game, but a hugely enjoyable one at the same time with some replayability. Strangely enough the game has infinite continues, so once your lives are used up you can just resume playing. There is also a save function, which makes one of the game’s hardest achievements a bit more bearable.
