Asterix & Obelix XXL 3 – The Crystal Menhir (PC)
After OSome Studios remastered Asterix & Obelix XXL 2, they immediately revealed a third title was in the works for the series, aiming to continuing the game franchise they had been tasked with remastering. After the original two XXL games and their remake of the second one, you would figure the team would have a good idea of what worked with the series and what didn’t. The repetitive and tedious combat held back the previous two titles, so for the third game in the series OSome Studios had the chance to break away from that focus… but instead they doubled down on it, turning away from the 3D platforming elements of the previous XXL games and making Asterix & Obelix XXL 3 – The Crystal Menhir quite squarely a beat ’em up with an even heavier combat focus.
This certainly sounds dire after the repetitious combat bogged down the previous two titles, but overcorrecting into the combat could be a potentially valid tactic provided that came with the expected expansion to the fighting mechanics that would allow it to actually support this design decision. A beat ’em up focus actually did lead to an expanded moveset for the two playable characters, the scrappy little Gaul Asterix and his big goofy companion Obelix not only packing different attacks from each other, but you can play together with a second player or simply switch between the two heroes as you wish. For the most part you will rely on generic attack chains to do your damage though, and many of your fights with the Roman soldiers don’t really ask for much more than hammering the attack button and making sure you’re not in a position to be prodded with spears or sliced by swords. Most of the variety to fights comes from the few enemy types encountered. Archers hang out on the periphery of battles pestering you with arrows so you need to step aside to take care of them, enemies with horns will call in back-up from tents you need to destroy, a rather poorly conceived enemy will stun you with a spear poke and appears far too frequently and breaks up combat flow far too often, and shielded enemies require you to break away their defenses before you can actually start dealing serious damage.
Breaking shields and handling enemy groups often comes down to the special abilities you can activate. Obelix can call on the pair’s puppy Dogmatix to stun enemies, but the little dog has trouble actually keeping up and sometimes won’t even attack when called on because of his poor ability to follow the pair around the levels. Asterix’s special power is to pull out a potion that makes him incredibly powerful and speedy, and while he can still take damage in this state and thus it is not always the best for using against clusters of tough soldiers, it’s good for clearing out crowds of weaker foes. Both Gaulish heroes also have a set of four special attacks such as an uppercut that cracks shields, the ability to twirl enemies around and smack others with them, and the pretty much all around superior option of doing a small spin that damages everyone around you and breaks shields. The charge attack is basically not worth mentioning due to its inferiority and likelihood of putting you in danger, but another note should be made that Asterix is almost entirely inferior to Obelix as well, the bigger Gaul made the all around better combat option the moment he picks up the Crystal Menhir.
The plot of Asterix & Obelix XXL 3 – The Crystal Menhir quite obviously revolves around this precious item, the large magical stone being at the center of all the game’s action. Thanks to Asterix and Obelix, a small village in Gaul stills holds out against the Roman Empire’s efforts to conquer them, but when the village druid Getafix learns the priestess Avina Gandir from the icy land of Thule has been captured by the empire, he fears what Caesar might do with her incredible magical knowledge. Specifically, he fears what might happen if they get their hands on her stone that controls the elements, the Snæfellhelgajökull… or the Crystal Menhir for short. Luckily, Getafix had been holding onto it for her, but to free Avina they must restore its magical power so it can locate its creator, a task that requires traveling to distant lands to find the magical shards that contain its elemental powers. Since Obelix is the only one strong enough to carry the huge stone, he ends up dragging it with him everywhere during the adventure, his spin move expanded in reach because he adds the stone to it and its elemental powers able to burn and freeze foes without expending ability power. With ability upgrades you can buy at the shop as well, you can make Obelix spin even longer, so the reasonable approach to fights with any degree of challenge becomes to whip out Obelix’s cyclone attack and then sweep up anyone still left.
They Crystal Menhir does at least factor into the game’s puzzle element quite a bit. While a majority of the game is definitely the brawling action with the somewhat tilted top-down perspective to the fighting, there are portions where you’re asked to do a bit more than bash Romans repeatedly. The menhir’s fire power is used for puzzles where you need to get its flames to the right area to burn down obstructions, a magnetic power is used to frequent effect when its introduced in pulling levers out of reach or yanking out metal platforms to cross gaps, but the ice power seemingly has no puzzle solving purpose. Even attempts to freeze water spouts with it in the ice area of the game proved fruitless, and after the big section introducing magnetic powers, the game mostly just falls back on burning plants for it later sections as its primary problem solving mechanic. The attempts to integrate some puzzle sections do at least break up the monotony of regular combat despite their oddly skewed power favoritism, and considering the game’s other attempts at variety flop, the rare puzzle certainly feels necessary to keep the game from being an outright slog.
Asterix & Obelix XXL 3 – The Crystal Menhir avoids the previous titles’ boss repetition problem by completely avoiding bosses up until the very end, this meaning you’ll mostly be seeing the same Roman soldier enemies you’ve been fighting since around the second adventuring area right up until the end. The exact weapons of shieldbearers will change and a Roman in golden armor provides buffs when he crops up a bit less frequently, but only the final fight of the story features a big break from the battle styles featured elsewhere, and even that fight leans pretty heavily on the design approach of having many Roman soldiers be the real danger found in the skirmish. While your trips to places like the icy land of Thule, the sandy markets, and an underground labyrinth try to mix in puzzles with the battles, even when the game teases the possible presence of a minotaur, it’s really just going to be more Romans to fight in between those puzzles. The Roman camps dispense with puzzle solving though and just lean in hard on fighting a bunch of soldiers, and while you might be able to grab collectibles during these segments to break away from mindless fighting, the Roman camps definitely emphasize how unexciting the combat gets fairly quickly.
Some subquests can be found along your adventure, and these do make an attempt to break up the gameplay formula some but with often middling results. A race to get somewhere is a break away from the fighting focus but not too substantial, a quest to help a chicken across the ice is more slow than challenging, and sometimes all these optional quests offer is a fight in a place you’ve never fought soldiers before with some extra pressure like a timer. Perhaps even sadder is that even the humor can be just as repetitive as the gameplay. A joke is made early on about politely asking the Romans to leave and it crops up consistently across the quest, Obelix repeats the same line about smelling boar throughout, and his growing attachment to the menhir like it was a living companion peters out without any big punchline. Not every joke is a swing and a miss of course, and the game even makes fun of other jokes told in the Asterix & Obelix XXL series like Obelix bemoaning how everyone keeps explaining why he doesn’t get to use Asterix’s strength-boosting potion, and you can expect the punny names to be in full force as they usually are in Asterix adventures. A merchant named Ekonomikrisis, a rebel named Rezzy Stance, and the postman Postaldistrix all have that cute twist to their name, and having the heroes talk during play can at least distract a touch from the lack of creativity in what they’re talking over. Still, it’s certainly not frequent or uproarious enough to help this game pull itself out of the monotonous mire it charged enthusiastically into.
THE VERDICT: Breaking from the series formula could have helped Asterix & Obelix XXL 3 – The Crystal Menhir break away from the repetitive combat that plagued its predecessors, but even with its small additions like the magical menhir and more abilities, the core play is still far too repetitive to get invested in. Menhir powers allow for some decent puzzle solving between battles, but you aren’t really asked to get creative with ability usage or how you approach most fights, and even elements like the humor feel like they are recycling the same ideas as well. For the most part the monotonous play stems from settling into far too basic of a beat ’em up design and not iterating enough on how fights are structured, and with the shifts away from that tedious action not common enough or particularly imaginative themselves, this adventure ends up defined by its consistent dullness.
And so, I give Asterix & Obelix XXL 3 – The Crystal Menhir for PC…
A BAD rating. Putting us at three for three when it comes to bad games in the Asterix & Obelix XXL series, this one at least gets to say its failings are more in how it designs its challenges than any outright awful gameplay mechanics. Asterix may come up short compared to the powerful Obelix once the Crystal Mehir enters the bigger Gaul’s moveset, but he can still hold his own in a scrap even if those fights are fairly repetitive and better handled by twirling the magic rock around. Emphasizing the combat with such a low amount of enemy variety is pretty much the formula for a repetitive beat ’em up, and in the Roman camps you definitely begin to feel how empty the fights are once you’ve seen the extent of the foes the game has to offer. Even when it’s technically bringing in some new enemy types later on the game doesn’t require you to change up your tactics much, and the soldiers with spears that stun you slow down fights without adding anything to them. This brawler could have been decent if enemy abundance was swapped out for a greater diversity in what they throw at you, and some bosses would definitely go a long way in forcing creative ability use since most soldiers fold too easily to the tornado spins. The puzzle solving is the game’s main glimmer of hope and where it slips into something more acceptable and varied for a while, but the late game starting to just mix up the same ideas of how the fire menhir can be used shows that something like the ice menhir wasn’t used to its full potential, and the stone menhir’s basic power of breaking things is almost entirely negligible when it could have formed the core of a new problem solving style.
OSome Studios wasn’t necessarily wrong for trying to base the game more around battling than its already battle-heavy predecessors. In fact, the puzzle-solving present would have been an acceptable amount of time spent away from fighting if the battle system was actually engaging. Instead though, Asterix & Obelix XXL 3 – The Crystal Menhir slips into the same repetition problem of the first two titles and suffers because it has placed even more emphasis on that monotonous battle system, and while its issues are more a lack of imagination and gameplay evolution, it still ends up on par with its more flawed ancestors because it can’t muster up a good reason to engage with its unexceptional action.