The Haunted Hoard: Werewolf: The Last Warrior (NES)

When it comes to classic horror monsters, the werewolf seems to play second fiddle to the vampire. Vampires earn their appeal by being cunning and charismatic, but the werewolf is a more primal beast that relies on its immense strength, sharp claws, and deadly fangs to be fearsome. However, if it wasn’t for the mindless fury of the werewolf form, it would likely seems more like a power-up than a curse, and in Werewolf: The Last Warrior, that is exactly what it is, Chief War Wolf needing to call upon his wolf form to have any chance of defeating Faryan and his mutant army.

 

However, Chief War Wolf will start off his adventure as a weak human, but in many early levels, it’s not too hard to uncover the special symbols that will transform him into his werewolf form. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Werewolf form is almost a straight upgrade to your powers and strength, and in this platforming action game, you’ll want to spend as much time as possible in wolf form. Being a human does have one advantage, that being a move where you can hold down a button to fire a powerful beam that gets replaced with a self-damaging screen wide attack as the wolf that is too risky to utilize, but as a human it’s your only real upside. Your regular punches are weak and you lack powers that are essentially required in certain areas, such as the wolf’s back flip that is the only way to avoid damage from things like laser beams and instant death lightning bolts. Activating the back flip is inconsistent despite being incredibly important in certain situations, the seemingly simple tasking of pressing A and B together having issues with input reading that can lead to a simple jump instead or a delayed flip that can spell easy doom. Similarly useful but flawed is the wolf’s ability to climb walls, the player able to latch onto and scale large vertical surfaces… but also constantly clinging to almost any wall they touch while in the air. Leaping off the wall is a bit finicky as well since there are moments you need to leap onto the top of a wall but detaching requires jumping away from it, but the so-called “ceiling walking” takes the cake on the most mechanically flawed power the wolf gets. The wolf is given long arm blades to enhance his punches to be stronger and have a wider reach, and with these blades he can hook himself onto some ceilings, the move requiring you to punch upwards at the perfect moment in your jump to latch on. Sometimes the ceiling walk is right above a bottomless pit, meaning you have to land this awkward upwards punch under threat of immediate death, but on the other hand, not using it can mean certain areas will be impossible to clear without getting hurt or falling into that hole, so the awkward wolf powers are definitely necessary in many parts.

There is one wolf power that is pretty much free of any problems, and that’s its ability to crawl. Levels contain power-ups and items all around, many requiring a punch to uncover with the best stuff often hidden in areas only the wolf can reach with a little work. Crawling into an alcove can help you find things like health and extra lives, and since this is a game with limited lives and continues and high difficulty, they’re definitely helpful to uncover. You do have a generous health meter for handling regular enemies and obstacles, but losing too much life will revert you back to human, so health pick-ups are definitely highly important as well. Other items you can find will be things like red bubbles that grant brief invincibility, a smaller but similar red bubble that clears the screen of enemies, and white bubbles that provide Anger Points. When you earn enough Anger Points, you can become the Super Werewolf, which is a golden form that is faster, jumps higher, and hits harder than the normal wolf but is almost never available anywhere such advantages would be very useful. There are also pick-ups that can add to your timer, each level having a time limit that doesn’t really seem to be there for any reason besides to make certain areas in the game more frustrating. Timers can encourage quick play or serve as a stopping point for something otherwise endless, but Werewolf: The Last Warrior has stages that require slow, careful movement and has boss battles where you don’t really get to set the pace, meaning the timer is likely to just make annoying moments even harder to overcome. Even if you can scrounge up a time bonus though, there are also Blue Ws, these meant to look like the red ones that give you wolf form. If you grab a Blue W, you are knocked down to a weaker form, meaning the wolf becomes a human and can be screwed in some situations. Some areas, if you search for a hidden goodie, will make it impossible to move forward without grabbing that Blue W due to tight quarters, the search for extras hampered by this risk.

 

When it comes to level design, the early ones aren’t completely awful. Many stages have split designs where different routes through them might feature more enemies, more precise platforming challenges, or more opportunities for power-ups, but you are somewhat locked into a choice once you’ve made it, the screen only willing to scroll backwards sometimes and usually only when your route choice would otherwise be a dead end. Depending on the area, enemies can range from constantly respawning and moving towards you to only triggering when you’ve stepped into the right area, and as the game progresses, both of these get more dangerous and deadly. Aggressive enemies will move towards you smarter, attack from range, or move away from your attacks, and the enemies in set spots will be placed more deviously. Some weak enemies still crop up like ones wielding guns you can pilfer briefly to fire a single shot with, but the fighting is mostly about clearing away annoyances who are trying to reduce your health or screw up platforming challenges. The bosses are definitely a weird selection though, mainly because you constantly fight a muscly man named The Giant Head throughout the adventure with very few changes to his tactics, the fight boiling down to both of you just throwing punches as he moves around. Some bosses like the Fireman are incredibly difficult due to them being faster and stronger… until you find the one perfect spot to stand or one consistent trick that makes them slow but efficient slogs.

So far though, while Werewolf: The Last Warrior is definitely bad in a few ways, it might at least be possible to push through it all, some of the levels not too grating or being kind enough to the werewolf’s controls that you won’t be screwed over too often. Then you reach the fourth world. The Great Spirit that assists Chief War Wolf starts off the stage with the odd but incredibly true warning “I need not remind you that water is the natural enemy of the werewolf”, and in this water focused stage, you’ll quickly find that any drop down the waterfalls will lead to immediate death. Hopping across rocks beside the waterfalls, it becomes abundantly clear that at this point that Data East expects you to stop playing because any semblance of fair game design has been tossed aside. For the final two worlds and their individual levels, Werewolf: The Last Warrior is desperate to kill you. Those jumps in front of the waterfalls now feature fish who will leap up the moment they detect you, the player having no way to anticipate where they might appear. The player can do a small jump forward to trigger some fish, but others are too far out, and unless you time an attack perfectly by chance, you will get hit, and when the fish hit you, you’re knocked down to your death. What’s worse, these levels introduce men with jetpacks who will fly around firing on you while you’re also trying to avoid the fish, increasing the chances of an immediate failure, and enemies like these are a constant fixture of the game’s final levels.

 

Keep in mind that Werewolf: The Last Warrior is a game with limited lives and continues in combination with these late game woes, and things are only going to get worse. After dying you are reverted back to a human, and your chances to get werewolf strength back are incredibly limited going forward. While I can’t say certain areas are technically impossible despite being much weaker and lacking certain skills, the final boss seems near impossible without werewolf form because it has lightning attacks that the backflip seems absolutely required for, and to get to that point with the form requires retaining the power up through the final boss’s early phases and the preceding level. This game tanks so hard in the final stretch despite already being mostly bad, the final two worlds grueling in their absolute insistence on perfection in face of hazards and enemies you are going to have to get killed by to learn, all while not providing enough of the tools needed to even stand some chance against them. Honestly, the cheesy comic included with the game might be the best part of the experience despite just being written to set up the action, but at least the last few pages of that book don’t require overcoming obnoxious limitations to finish.

THE VERDICT: Werewolf: The Last Warrior begins as a sloppy game where the controls aren’t as responsive as you’d hope, but when you reach the back half of the experience, Werewolf: The Last Warrior reveals just how little it cares about the player’s enjoyment. Progressing any further becomes grueling as the player must memorize every instant death enemy trap while still struggling with clunky controls, and since the werewolf form is practically required, the game reverting you to human form after a death feels like an unnecessary kick in the teeth after the repeated kicks to the shins that are the final level designs. What begins as something flawed but deceptively bearable takes a hard nosedive into unfairness because Werewolf: The Last Warrior does not want you to beat it, so ultimately the player shouldn’t want to play this flagrantly hostile NES platformer.

 

And so, I give Werewolf: The Last Warrior for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

An ATROCIOUS rating. Going from obnoxious to almost irredeemable once you hit world 4, Werewolf: The Last Warrior is a perfect example of some problems with early game design. It was made during an era that tried to make up for little content with excruciating difficulty, and to encourage purchases over rentals, areas are designed to specifically force game restarts and make it near impossible to beat the game in the span of the rental period. The comic book pack-in feels like the right way to incentive purchases of a new copy, but instead, Werewolf: The Last Warrior loads its back level with moments meant to drain lives from a player without giving them much recourse, almost everything from the transformation mechanics, the time limit, the enemy design, and the lives systems all coming together here to specifically impede the player and deny them any closure on completing the game. It’s like the witch from Hansel & Gretel, drawing in your attention with its early levels before cramming you in the oven to suffer for the final two worlds, but in this metaphor her house of sweets would already be stale and somewhat nasty looking before you face your unfortunate fate. It’s a game that starts bad and then takes a nosedive as it ignores the ideas that could work like the different routes through levels and the searches for power-ups.

 

Werewolf: The Last Warrior certainly won’t be improving the image of classic horror’s second place monster with its messy gameplay. It certainly makes you want to play as a werewolf, but that’s because it makes being a human near unbearable, and even then the werewolf is a marginal upgrade since the world becomes too openly hostile to really want to continue through once you hit the waterfalls. While the whole game isn’t totally abysmal, the beginning doesn’t endear much with the awkward controls either, meaning that while water may inexplicably be the natural enemy of the werewolf, Werewolf: The Last Warrior is instead the natural enemy of the player.