Gargoyles Remastered (Switch)

I have owned the Gargoyles game for Sega Genesis since I was little, so when news came that it was getting a remaster, it only sounded like a good thing to me. However, I was surprised to see a more negative reaction from others who deemed it a poor choice for a rerelease. This made me consider why my reaction would be so different, and I realized rather quickly why. When I played Gargoyles as a kid, I was still dazzled by video games in general, and since my skills were only starting to develop, if I encountered something with high difficulty, I would figure it to be a personal failing that I couldn’t overcome it. I hadn’t revisited the game since I was quite young, so now, with thousands of games of experience behind me, I decided to see not only if Gargoyles Remastered did a good job reproducing this 1995 adaptation of the Disney animated series, but if this game was ever any good in the first place.

 

This action platformer takes place across two eras connected by one mysterious artifact: the Eye of Odin. Beginning first with the siege of Wyvern Castle by vikings, the burly gargoyle Goliath must protect the rookery and its eggs within, but when hit with a curse to turn him to stone, he is destined to awaken later in modern day New York where another foe seeks the Eye and robotic foes aim to stop you instead. Gargoyles Remastered is a very faithful remaster of this adventure in some ways, partly because it includes not only the original untouched Genesis game as a play option, but even the new remastered modes allow you to press a button and instantly swap the visuals and music to their past equivalents. It is, essentially, just an effort to make the game look more like the television show with only a few bells and whistles like being able to save anywhere and rewind recent actions.

However, there are definitely times the remaster comes up short. The old look and feel of Gargoyles on Genesis was a lot moodier, Goliath himself looking almost demonic and the environments were much darker. Even the music, despite clearly being made for an old game system, stands out more. The new look that mimics the animated show doesn’t necessarily look bad most of the time, and it even tries to copy some old touches like the orange tinted foundry levels affecting the appearance of Goliath as well. However, it also causes a few issues with its new look, like how the arrows flying through the air at the very start of the game are clearly visible in the past but hard to discern against the background now. Similarly, in some of your traipsing across rooftops in Manhattan, you’ll find sometimes an important object blends in with the scenery where it popped more in the old graphics, some vital visual information for gameplay ignored in favor of a consistent new look.

 

For navigating the game’s surprisingly slim set of five levels, Goliath has a few tricks. Not only does the gargoyle have a second jump with the aid of his wings, but he can cling to most surfaces, be they ceiling or wall. Navigating a castle, skyscrapers, or a factory all end up making use of his climbing ability quite frequently, although they also strain it a fair bit too. Gargoyles Remastered has a heavy focus on pinpoint jumping, such as an early segment where the walls have fiery ballistas shooting through holes and the walls you must climb to avoid them have very little safe space on top of the firing pattern that gives you little time to line things up. A segment later in the game has you constantly hanging from crucibles in a foundry, climbing around its edges to avoid what will likely be a death or just a great deal of health lost and progress undone. The mix of climbing with jumping does open up levels to be explored more deeply and stages can hide a great deal of hidden pick-ups for you to find if you do clamber about, but the jumping goes on to have another issue tied to swinging. Goliath can grab onto things like poles or switches to do a quick swing, this sometimes necessary to do many times in a row or it will again be positioned above a very high drop with consequences for falling. Unfortunately, in the new graphics especially, it can be difficult to hit right where the game expects you to be to activate a swing, and while you can slowly get a better feel for its tight demands, it is still easy to slip up, especially when you’re doing it multiple times in a row while respawning enemies harass you.

Goliath does have one advantage, that being a beefy health bar that can be refilled in small amounts but with a fair bit of frequency. Most enemies drop a chalice when killed and many float around the levels you find yourself in, each chalice giving at least a tiny sliver of life back and some serving as full heals. These heals are why I was likely to make it to the boss of level 3 as a kid, an impressive elevator robot empowered by the Eye of Odin, but the bosses can vary wildly in their difficulty level. The first two comprise of vikings who don’t seem like they’d be too easy on the surface, but they both have spots you can easily set up in and repeat the same attacks to wear them down with little risk. It didn’t even require deliberate effort to uncover these, but the bosses in New York are a more demanding bunch and not afraid to have instant death drops in their arenas. In battle, Goliath doesn’t have very many interesting attack options. A simple slash combo that will be what you mostly just mindlessly use on whatever is in front of you is almost all that is required, but a jumping slash, a crouching slash, and options like a charge tackle can find limited use. Unfortunately, if an enemy can sustain a few hits, their fight is usually a bit of a guessing game. Axe throwing viking women for example can throw it in ways that are hard to dodge, and while the dog-like spiked robots of the present can at least be predicted to eventually attack you if you spend too much time close to them, they’re also often in tight spaces like a train interior or near other enemies so you don’t have the room to fight carefully by waiting out their attacks. Most foes won’t hold you up too long at least and some stages like the castle and rooftops don’t have many instant death drops, the player sometimes just having to tough it out and hope a chalice lies ahead with the health needed to undo that damage you weathered.

 

Sadly, the remaster feels like it does very little to improve the original Genesis game save giving you the room to undo your failures, whether they be from your own abilities coming up short or the game having some poor design decisions both in the past and how the new look obscures things. There are no extra touches like concept art galleries, and while hearing the Gargoyles theme in a more clear and accurate form than the Genesis sound font is nice, it’s almost like the game tried to get away with the bare minimum. Perhaps this remaster was chosen since reviews from the time were happy to pay out big scores for its graphical presentation, but now with that aspect papered over with a more “accurate” look, it’s hard to really point at anything this game does that makes it worth a look.

THE VERDICT: Gargoyles Remastered is chiseled from flawed stone, and unfortunately, it doesn’t seem interested in doing much with the original work beyond giving it a new coat of paint. The original had rough platforming, boring combat, and levels designed for frustration with their easy deaths and detection issues, and sometimes the new look closer to the Gargoyles cartoon only makes these issues worse. The rewind and save feature now allow you to avoid having to commit to the moments things aren’t working the best, but they mostly just let you continue forward into more moments where you’ll be tempted to use it to avoid annoying enemies and climbing challenges. Clambering about does lead to some more interesting stage designs with helpful pick-ups to find and the health system lets you push on through in some cases, but Gargoyles Remastered ends up ensuring that Gargoyles wasn’t great on Genesis and now it’s not great on Switch either.

 

And so,  I give Gargoyles Remastered for Nintendo Switch…

A TERRIBLE rating. Goliath was sealed in stone ages ago and revived in the modern day for good reason, his need to stop the powerful Eye of Odin from ending up in the wrong hands a simple but meaningful motivation. Gargoyles Remastered unfortunately pulled a forgotten game out the past and ends up just as rocky as that old version, and with only marginal improvements and some new drawbacks, it remains a bit of a mystery why it in particular was revived and in such a simple state. Gargoyles Remastered unfortunately shows the world the original game was propped up on people marveling at its moody atmosphere, it looking sharp on the Genesis with its pre-rendered models for the robots and its color choices to make the world look grim and dark. Now we can have it look closer to the television series but it impresses less for it, the hand-drawn look decent in a vacuum but it causes gameplay problems in a game that already had enough to begin with. Gargoyles Remastered isn’t always hitting you with its worst elements, the first level for example waits a while for the platforming to become rough and demanding and you’ll need a bit to realize the fighting never gets much better than that first encounter with a lady viking. Gargoyles Remastered is in need of polish, its edges smoothed in terms of control, but it would also stray quite a bit from the source material if it started to try and make its combat more enjoyable. Still, even making the movement more responsive so you can nail the tight requirements would do a great deal in cleaning the game up without completely altering its nature. With this mostly a reproduction rather than a more involved remake though, the issues were set in stone in 1995 and their legacy now continues on, a generation with many more choices for what to play and a greater understanding of what makes games good able to view it for what it unfortunately is.

 

Gargoyles Remastered does trigger my usual appreciation that an old game, especially a licensed one, was allowed to see rerelease, but by including the untouched Genesis original in the game, it also feels like it had carte blanche to make more drastic changes and the developers simply elected not to. Perhaps the developer Empty Clip Studios could only get Disney to agree to let them handle this game, perhaps it wasn’t allowed to alter the material much or given the time to make great changes. Whatever the truth might be, people can at least now decide if things like rewinds and instant saving can help them appreciate what this game was going for, but it’s not likely to draw too many interested players if they know the truth of what they’re getting into in advance.