Golden Axe: Beast Rider (PS3)

2008’s Golden Axe: Beast Rider was created as a reimagining of the Golden Axe series that had been mostly quiet since it’s last fully new game in 1994, but while taking the 2D brawler series into 3D might have lead to a few growing pains, it was a variety of poor business decisions colliding that ended up sealing this game’s fate. Developer Secret Level mostly had experience in porting games to console rather than making fully new ones and yet Sega had so much faith in them they bought them out and then split their development team so half could go work on an Iron Man game for PS3 and Xbox 360. Not all fault lies on Sega though as even before the split, Secret Level promised more than they knew they could make and just hoped it would come together, ultimately having to pare down the features to make this action game come to life. In the end Golden Axe: Beast Rider would be a messy product that lead to the franchise being put on ice again, but it certainly could have been messier if Secret Level hadn’t wisely carved out the parts that weren’t working.

Golden Axe: Beast Rider features the story of Tyris Flare although there’s not a lot to the tale being told and thus it feels unearned when the game attempts to milk some drama out of its climax. Tyris is a member of the Axirian Sisterhood who worship a great dragon who is immediately snatched by the forces of the dark lord Death Adder in the game’s opening level. With her clan wiped out and deity stolen, Tyris seeks to save the dragon only to find that Death Adder has conquered much of the outside world already with his forces. Tyris isn’t totally alone in her quest,  a dwarf named Gilius Thunderhead appearing to tell her that the legendary Golden Axe has been shattered and uniting its pieces might give her a hope of defeating the mysterious Death Adder, the game then mostly focusing on action save for introducing the character of Tarik who appears, does nothing of note, and seems to only exist to tease the idea of a sequel. With some poorly written and generic dialogue during the moments characters speak it was probably wiser to deemphasize the actual plot elements, but it does leave any moment it resurfaces feeling weak since there was little build-up to character moments like Tyris’s supposed anguish in making a choice near the game’s end.

The majority of the focus in Golden Axe: Beast Rider is on sword combat, the player progressing through bland brown and grey barbarian camps and strongholds on their path to avenge the Axirians and stop Death Adder. Tyris has two basic attacks with a quick slash and a slower stronger attack, both being able to perform quick simple combos but also featuring an interesting touch in where delaying a slash properly can instead release a brutal attack where the blade is wreathed in flame for more damage. You are also given a kick if you press both attack buttons at once that can shove even larger enemies quite far away, but its main purpose is the rather macabre approach to levers where you need to kick someone onto a hook to open gates at times. Along with their jumping variants (with the jumping kick in particular practically useless beyond one point in the game where it’s absolutely required to clear a gap without the game ever alluding to this use beforehand) these attacks are useful for simple damage but not actually the heart of the battle system. There are certainly many enemies you can take out with quick use of these slashes, but you’ll rack up a good deal of damage yourself if you don’t utilize the counter system.

Enemy attacks will include a flash of green, blue, or orange light, these being indicators on how you’re meant to reply to their incoming strike. Blue indicates you need to parry, orange instead warns you it’s time to evade, and green allows for either one to be utilized, and unless you’re positioned just so these attacks will likely hit if you don’t respond with the right maneuver. If you do use the right option though you’ll be able to unleash a powerful attack with your blade coated in fire, and since enemies can hit hard or interrupt you if you aren’t paying attention to this system, later on you’ll learn that you often are best off standing in place, waiting for a counter opportunity, executing it, and then maybe getting a few slashes in while the enemy reels before standing still and waiting for more counter opportunities. Enemies do shift up how fast their strikes are, some enemies will instead glow red to indicate they’ll break through an attempt to parry, and magic-wielding enemies instead require you to figure out the parry timing rather than having a helpful color flash, but Golden Axe: Beast Rider will throw so many foes at you and often focus pretty hard on generic goons who lean into the counter system in a pretty standard manner. The game can shake off absolute repetition, but the number of encounters still ensures that you get far too many stand-and-wait fights even though the game packs some enemies who can shake them up from time to time.

Tyris is able to wield magic herself, slowly getting more options like hurling a fireball or sending a blast of flame out all around her. As you progress in your adventure you’ll even unlock more advanced versions of these spells that increase their potency or even change their appearance to the point they mimic dragon flame, but the cost and lack of impact severely weakens this as a reasonable option. You can carry up to six magic potions but even the least potent spell has the cost of one of them and replenishment opportunities are often spaced quite far apart. A simple fireball doesn’t seem to faze most enemies all that much although the fire blast all around you is at least a decent tool to punish foes who crowd you, but still the magic potions are rare enough you don’t have many chances to utilize the more advanced spells and little motivation to whip them out. More important than these spells though is the Golden Axe itself, which is used as a long-range projectile mostly for hitting axe-shaped symbols to open gates or finish off foes who are going to heal otherwise. It’s not really much of a process to pull it out and hurl it towards the target unless there are enemies nearby who will interrupt, but the symbols are invisible initially so sometimes you need to search and area using the pulse of the Golden Axe ability icon to find it.

Golden Axe: Beast Rider does at least mix in a few activities outside of fighting that it doesn’t completely descend into constant mind-numbing action. Navigating around traps, figuring out how to hold down switches, or moments like needing to places enemies on the lever hooks in a challenge that is more about speed than combat pull you out of the battle mindset for a bit, and one area that almost brought it together in an interesting way is the Titan Wastelands. An embodiment of the early false promises of Golden Axe: Beast Rider being potentially an open world title, one segment of this part of the game presents a wide desert to explore in search of a few Golden Axe pieces. There are treasures to find, switches you can hit to unlock an area with a Dragon Statue that serves as the game’s initially abundant but then surprisingly well restricted extra life system, and there are battles out in the wastes for those axe pieces. However, at this point the game really begins to struggle. Already the game had a few issues with the music cutting out and the game slowing down as processing took a hit, but the desert really causes the game to strain as the graphical slow down increases and I even encountered an odd freezing glitch where the entire world turned into a green and red striped mess that lead to me losing all my progress in that section. The game splits its stages into “challenges” where their beginning serves as your revival point if you have no Dragon Statues and finishing one gives you a rating based on things like completion speed and Tribute, this being the money you collect from treasures and enemy battles that mostly goes towards buying weapons for the game’s Challenge mode where you fight waves of enemies and Trials where you can retry story mode levels to get better scores. Unfortunately these splits aren’t always spaced the best and can lead to even greater repetition in long segments like the desert if you do end up dying.

Despite taking this long to mention it, Golden Axe: Beast Rider does in fact feature beast riding and with enough regularity to justify its placement in the title. Throughout the adventure you’ll encounter either enemies riding atop monsters or mounts appearing at respawn points so they can be used for a few more puzzle-adjacent purposes. The beasts you can ride include creatures like the fire-breathing Abrax as the most common mount you’ll come across, the somewhat lupine Lynth that can turn invisible mostly to avoid fire turrets, and the towering rhino-inspired Krommath, each one having some limits on its effectiveness despite their power. The Abrax’s tail swipe for example has the annoying feature of often turning you around so you need to adjust after most uses and the Krommath’s stomp has a long wind-up, and while you would think this might limit how enemies use it as well they tend to just use the faster attack options. Special attacks like the fire breath do cost some of your ride’s health to use but not enough that it scares off their usage, and even if you get knocked from your ride and have it stolen, you can always do the same to your enemies.

One reasons having a beast underneath you is nice though is because they can often clear out enemy ranks much faster and without needing to engage with the slow counter system so even if their puzzle applications are often just about leaving them on switches or activating their one ability like the Lynth’s invisibility, you still will likely enjoy your time atop them more than off of them. The Lynth does get pushed a little too far at one point though, the game expecting you to sprint to gate before it closes but the hurdles you are meant to jump over strain the creature’s ability to handle uneven ground, leading to it getting stuck in a way clearly not meant to be part of the challenge. Unfortunately none of the mounts feature in the game’s boss battles which mostly comprise of slow gimmickry or a surprisingly forgiving final fight, although funnily enough the Queen of the Dead fight shows the combat could have been better as it actually makes limited but effective use of counters, makes weaving in normal attacks effective but not overly so, and still challenges you to avoid damage and figure out actual attacks instead of watching for color flashes.

THE VERDICT: Overlong repetitive battles that rely too heavily on a counter system and beast mounts that are more like a relief from that cycle despite their own flaws make up too much of Golden Axe: Beast Rider and even when it tries to break away from its standard approach, it’s often with simple ideas that come and go too quickly or strain the game’s technical problems like the rough Titan Wastelands desert section. You can see flickers of the game’s potential in the rare battle like the Queen of the Dead fight, but oftentimes you’ll instead be dealing with the same bland foes or engaging with simplistic puzzles that just barely break away from the action enough that you don’t get completely fed up with standing in place waiting to see what color a flashing counter light will be.

And so, I give Golden Axe: Beast Rider for PlayStation 3…

A TERRIBLE rating. Secret Level quite wisely kept itself away from more areas like the desert that would likely cause this game to crash and crumble more, but it doesn’t fill the space it does have left with enough to be consistently entertaining. There are moments you break away from the monotony that buoy the experience just enough that you aren’t mired in omnipresent repetitive action, but its deviations aren’t substantial enough to save it, and some like avoiding stone faces that will blow you off a cliff for an instant kill aren’t the kind of interruptions you’d want to experience anyway. The beasts end up perhaps the best break from the standard swordplay despite being simple in their own right, but it can feel like they were made cumbersome in ways that bothers you more than properly limit you. Being whipped around or waiting to do basic attacks sucks some of the energy out of these power trips, and with enemies able to knock you off or kill your mount fine enough already it doesn’t feel like they needed to be as unwieldy as they are. A few of the unmentioned late game mounts do tidy up their controls some and the last new one you get even has a limit in that you need to keep it fed to keep it compliant that colors how you fight instead of restricting it too much, but when you do end up back on foot you’ll often wish you are back on even the least smooth ride since at least the enemies die more quickly to them than your simple sword combos.

Golden Axe: Beast Rider was a bad bet but mostly in regards to the corporate situation surrounding it. The Queen of the Dead shows the battle system can work even though other bosses would rather lean on weak gimmicks, the mounts that appear later in the adventure can be strong without being overbearing or having rough controls, and the small taste of puzzles on offer do seem a fine starting point despite their simplicity. Unfortunately the game struggles to hold together under promises that Secret Level couldn’t fulfill while the battles that end up needing to carry the weight of the experience feel unimaginative or too dependent on basic simple strategies. This is more me saying the game isn’t flawed on a conceptual basis though, Golden Axe not a series that would have been ruined by a design shift in this direction necessarily. However, by heading in this direction and then flubbing the basics as the game struggles under its own weight despite not being all that ambitious, Golden Axe: Beast Rider pushed the franchise back into a long term hiatus while offering only a rough and repetitive experience for those curious to see how this Sega series stumbled.