Asterix & Obelix XXL: Romastered (PC)

The Asterix series of French comics has received an impressively high amount of video game adaptations, although many of them remain exclusive to Europe due to the franchise’s lower popularity in the States. In fact, looking at the list of Asterix games released prior to the original release of Asterix & Obelix XXL, you might be forgiven for thinking that title was using Roman numerals to represent its place in the series. As far as I can tell it’s simple a fun twist on how “extra extra large” would look like Roman numerals when written as initials, and while its original release in the United States swapped the name for the less ambiguous Asterix & Obelix: Kick Buttix, the remake of this PlayStation 2 and GameCube title reverts to its original European title with a cute pun to indicate its nature as a remake.

 

Taking place during the reign of Julius Caesar, Asterix, Obelix, and the other Gauls of their home town have managed to hold back the conquering Roman forces for quite a while, but when Asterix and Obelix leave their village in search of the missing pup Dogmatix, the Romans make their move and successfully capture all the other citizens and spread them across the Roman Empire. Smashing the marble map that shows where each of the villagers are being kept, Caesar departs for Rome, believing the Gauls to finally have been dealt with, but the two strongest Gauls are still free, setting out to rescue their kidnapped friends and use the map pieces to guide them on their journey. Each of the rescued Gaulish villagers has a pun for a name like Geriatrix and Fulliautomatix, and Asterix and Obelix certainly seem to be taking this rescue mission casually since bashing Romans with ease is sort of their usual shtick, so the game has a small but present sense of humor that comes through at parts despite not whipping out anything that will actually get you laughing. However, the spy who defects from the Roman empire to assist you quickly wears out his welcome, talking slowly and finding constant excuses to butt into the action to often inform you of obvious things like enemies ahead but also occasionally having vital info that means you can’t just skip through his sometimes improperly subtitled dialogue every time you meet him.

 

Caesar’s ex-spy is an obvious culprit when it comes to breaking this action game’s flow, but the action itself has quite a few issues as well. The player most often plays as the small and scrappy Asterix, and while combat isn’t the main focus of the title, it certainly crops up with such frequency that the fact you have one attack button is incredibly limiting. You can do a charge to push Roman soldiers into a line so you can then rapidly smack them with your attack button, but most of the fighting will be this unaltered punching. If an enemy is dazed though you can pick them up and begin swirling them around to damage other soldiers, but you will not be able to kill the one you’re holding or any of the ones you’re hitting until after you’re done with the twirling. There is no way to alter your basic attack string, and other options like calling in Dogmatix to make enemies drop their weapons can sometimes feel like its not worth the trouble when even the toughest foes seem to eventually drop their guard and let you hit them if you’re persistent. The player will swap control between Asterix and the enormous powerhouse Obelix at parts in the adventure, but he just slaps foes in the same manner, his strength reserved for breaking metal crates and thus he actually has less combat options than Asterix since the smaller Gaul can at least scoop up a potion to make him a bit tougher and faster with his basic attacks for a time. The last wrinkle to combat would be the combo attacks you can execute once you’ve hit enemies enough times in a fight, these often having unusually complex button combos considering your lack of attack options and often not worth the trouble for it or, for the easier ones like the tornado, are mostly there to ensure the end game where you fight literally thousands of Roman soldiers in one level won’t drag on forever.

While fighting thousands of soldiers in the last level sounds impressive, you spend much of the game fighting huge groups of roman soldiers, many of which are basically cannon fodder. They cluster around you in a group and you need to at least make sure they don’t pull off their slow attacks while whaling on the others, but these dumb infantry troops are often padding with little challenge to defeating them. They will usually have some sort of captain with them that can defend better and hit harder, and some later levels start throwing in specialized troops like archers, leaping lancers, gladiators, and even lions to add a bit of variety. These new foes are often more durable and thus slow to beat despite being distributed in more reasonable numbers, but besides some new approaches to dodging and potentially using Dogmatix or one of the few useful combos, these new enemy types don’t shake up your combat approach enough to really distract from how monotonous and empty most combat encounters feel.

 

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the battles in Asterix & Obelix: XXL Romastered though is that the bosses for the different regions of the Roman Empire are all literally the same siege engine rehashed again and again, the final boss even featuring yet another fight with this same design. Fortunately, despite the engine always having the same four spiked rollers you need to pop out and get behind to unscrew bolts, the exact nature of how this is done will shift a bit between fights. It may require some good jumping or use of a mechanism to hit the button on top that moves the rollers out or other enemies might enter the arena to make getting to the bolts a bit more difficult. Much like how new enemy types don’t do enough to alter regular combat though, the small changes to this repeated boss fight don’t really add the layer of depth needed to make the new battle feel fresh. Considering it isn’t even that great a boss design to start with, it leads to each world ending with a weak finale only alleviated some by the fact you get to meet the rescued Gauls after and find out just how someone named Unhygienix looks.

 

I’ve certainly lead with the weaker part of the experience though, as between the fights there is a lot of puzzle-solving and platforming challenges that make up more of the experience than the battles. While sometimes you do indulge in sliding down slopes and steering a boat in minigames as well, the core of Asterix & Obelix XXL: Romastered is figuring out how to open the way onward. Asterix and Obelix both have different skills to help with this, Obelix able to destroy the tougher iron crates to clear the way forward, and Asterix… can hold a torch. Many of Asterix’s puzzles involve laying out the path or figuring out the safest way to get his lit torch from a burning brassier to its final destination, and there are enough complications to this that it does remain challenging despite the conceptual simplicity. You may have to time your movements to avoid wind snuffing it out, make a path forward with Obelix so Asterix doesn’t end up dousing his flame by being forced to swim across, and enemies can actually serve as decent complications when they’re used to augment the puzzles instead of serve as fight challenges. The game has a few physics problems though, leading to moments like Asterix getting stuck in a TNT barrel I tried to light or ending up slipping through the elevator he was riding, but for the most part, if you’re meant to jump around an area and do some problem solving to make your way forward, than this game at least provides some decent obstacles that help distract from the boring battles.

Those puzzles don’t help the game get out of the woods yet though. While it is not a collectathon platformer, Asterix & Obelix XXL: Romastered is filled to bursting with things to collect. The Golden Laurels, despite only rewarding you with costumes if collected, are at least often hidden in places you might not think to check or reward you for tackling some puzzle or doing well in the minigames. However, the Roman helmets that are scattered around the world to an excessive degree and, once you realize what they’re used for, are overly abundant filler. A merchant shows up a few times in each world that you can spend the helmets at, their wares consisting of things like healing items or temporary health upgrades that aren’t really worth investing in. However, they also sell you the combo moves, meaning if you want to speed up the boring fights it’s good to scoop up the easier to execute ones for their high prices. With how much the game world is littered with the Roman helmets you might expect these combos moves to be insanely expensive, but after the second world I was already losing interesting smashing every crate and going for every helmet, and my more relaxed “grab them if its easy to do so” approach still allowed me to buy all the moves before the finale. Helmets can buy concept art as well, but the collection process is not enjoyable despite the game trying to pad its levels out by having them all over the place.

 

While your adventure takes you to the deserts of Egypt, the cold coast of Normandy, and Rome itself, the helmets, the crates that contain them, and the multipliers that can speed up helmet collection for a bit take up an undeserved amount of the game’s real estate. Many levels become much faster if you don’t smash every crate to collect this currency, and some areas become practically pointless if you don’t want to invest time in this optional pursuit. This leaves much of the game world feeling rather pointless once you’ve reasonably lost interest in this pursuit, the game mostly falling back on those puzzle platforming challenges to avoid being boring. However, while this remake didn’t seem to take the chance to turn this old title into something more enjoyable, it did do something intriguing with its nature as a remaster. At any time during play you can press a button and the game will switch from its new touched up graphics to the retro appearance more befitting its original release. The visual upgrade is certainly noticeable despite the cartoon art style, and the redone music also swaps out with the original soundtrack when this is done as well. However, the remastered music sometimes just won’t play at parts, meaning if I wanted appropriately dramatic music for the final boss, I would have had to play it exclusively in the retro mode to hear anything besides oddly calm background noise.

 

The steles threaten to make this swapping between remaster and original more interesting though, some of these optional challenges asking you to swap between past and present to collect coins hidden about the immediate area. These challenges don’t pay off in any big way besides personal satisfaction, but the coin collecting isn’t a very creative implementation of the remaster toggle sadly. The player just presses the button to alternate when one type of coin needs to be collected and you can still see them even when in the wrong mode. If the game had used new details like the additional animals lingering around or add touches like moss to maybe hide objects for a scavenger hunt split between modes it could have been interesting, but this doesn’t feel like swapping between old and new but rather just pressing a button when you need to collect one type of coin instead of the other. Not all stele challenges engage with the remaster mode either and are instead things like time challenges, and with other issues like invisible walls in areas where it looks like you could quite reasonably enter, I begin to worry that highlighting the negatives and half-baked ideas might give the impression that this game is worse than it is. The chain of actually interesting puzzles are more often to be broken up by something unexciting or repetitive rather than outright irritating, and bland ideas are more the norm than something that outright fails to work properly. That doesn’t redeem it by any means, and as a remaster it really should have cleaned up the game more, but it’s not an excruciating game so much as one that fails to find a way to make repeated content as interesting as it could have been.

THE VERDICT: Asterix & Obelix XXL: Romastered has a nicer look than the original and the problem solving featured in the adventure is enjoyable enough at parts, but the most impressive part of this action title is how weak almost everything else is. All the bosses are recycled machines of war, the enemy fights are frequently mindless affairs with far too many foes involved for how basic they are, and levels are padded with practically pointless collectibles to try and fill time. The remastered challenges fail to use the remaster toggle in an interesting manner, and really, most any mechanic that crops up fails to be exciting on its own, the puzzles coming out best because they have to keep iterating in new ways since figuring things out requires novelty while other ideas can lazily lean into repetitive designs. What could have been a chance to tidy up a flawed game of the past instead turns into a game defined by its missed opportunities.

 

And so, I give Asterix & Obelix XXL: Romastered for PC…

A BAD rating. Since the problem solving antics of the two main Gauls carry a good portion of the experience, the many flaws found in pretty much every other part of its design thankfully don’t get the degree of focus that would completely drag this game down into something miserable to play. Boring combat is undeniably mindless for the most part but is often peppered between the puzzles rather than serving as the main attraction save for some really flawed parts like the game’s finale. The absurd amount of helmets trying to make you think levels have more depth to them can be ignored to speed up the experience so they can’t be faulted too heavily, and the bosses and steles, while lacking in creativity, aren’t really awful so much as surprising retreads or failures to utilize interesting mechanics. The game is sadly just a constant list of missed opportunities and mechanics that never really evolve despite being trotted out repeatedly, and its successes or moments of mediocrity really can’t stand the amount of poor company they unfortunately keep.

 

This remaster comes after Osome Studio remade XXL 2 and created XXL 3 themselves so presumably they’d have knowledge enough of what works and what doesn’t for an Asterix game by now, but perhaps in revisiting the original Asterix & Obelix XXL they too heavily valued authenticity over playability. The fact that even their added touches aren’t too exciting though makes it hard to figure out, and I’ll likely only get my answer by playing the other Asterix games they made to find out how differently they play from this remaster. I would like more Asterix games to receive global releases, but if someone is going to put in the love to remake an old title, authenticity probably shouldn’t be an absolute priority. Perhaps as an extra mode it could be a fun bonus, but Asterix & Obelix XXL: Romastered should have focused on vital changes to the original’s mechanics rather than tinkering with less important aspects and throwing in half-baked new ideas.