I didn’t care at all for the last game in the Gauntlet series, Gauntlet Legends, because it seemed too nutty, too dark and too choppy. So with Jeffery Buchanan, producer for the next Gauntlet, standing by my side the entire time I played Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows, you could feel the tension in the E3 air. For two minutes, anyway. That’s all it took to realize that all my concerns, all my disappointments from the last game were completely gone. The pace has slowed, the graphics are fantastic for the genre and online support is in the works. Seven Sorrows has turned it all around.
Players start off with six characters, four being the traditional types (wizard, warrior, archer and valkyrie), and two that Midway’s not yet ready to talk about. Hundreds of items are obtainable to enhance your character, but overall appearance and armor are guided by six different points you reach while leveling up. When we asked Buchanan if players will be able to have jewels in their weapon to enhance its powers, he said they’re “thinking about it, but it’s not in the schedule right now.”
The game’s bosses take a little thought, as bosses should. In one instance, Buchanan showed us how to defeat a giant stone golem that had wizards skittering around its feet firing at us. At first we ran around firing all sorts of magic in every direction while the giant tried to crush us with a hammer. “Take out the wizards, and you take down the boss,” Buchanan said. It was a little challenging, and lots of fun, but eventually we won. And definitely better than anything Legends had to offer.
Knowing we weren’t alone in his play testing, we asked him if he had outside testers for the game. “Oh yeah,” he smiled, “my kids come into work all the time and play it for hours.”
The version we played at E3 was pre-alpha, but the graphics were already well-tuned and looked great. Tall grass flowed around characters in the wind as they fought multitudes of enemies, with no noticeable slowdown. The lighting effects from the spells and fires lit the scenery accurately, and the animations were smooth and moved at a nice pace. Everything looked alive, and we left feeling really impressed with what we’d seen.
As if answering our Gauntlet prayers, four-player online support is also in the works, both for Xbox and PS2. This is wonderful news, particularly for Xbox owners, because Gauntlet-style gameplay isn’t something you can currently find on Xbox Live. Dungeon crawlers everywhere should rejoice. The co-op game on a single screen was a lot of fun, so if Midway can bring this experience online, we’ll have a smash hit to steal our money away this holiday season.
Even though E3 is filled with games in an early state, good gameplay is easy to judge. And Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows was already lots of fun, not to mention good-looking, with months of development still ahead of it. Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows has high goals that we’d love to see Midway actually reach. Stick with DailyGame in the months ahead to find out if they are.
— Robert Dusseau
