Perhaps some of the most fascinating Game Boy Advance games are the ones that are the most panned. There’s tons of shovelware that’s absolutely atrocious, but also just didn’t receive any kind of written or video-based attention - the kind of games that would get 1s and 2s on IGN or something if they actually got a review. But when I’m scrolling MetaCritic, I find a game like Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, which received reviews in the 30s, and I can’t help but think… What the hell happened?

Wait, hang on, this was developed by Pocket Studios? The Pocket Studios who made Fellowship of the Ring?

Ohhhh, I think I know why Dark Legacy scored so badly.

A Simple Facade

At first, it doesn’t all look that bad. Gauntlet: Dark Legacy initially presents itself as a perhaps overly simplistic action-RPG - one that, whilst a tad boring, doesn’t seemingly deserve the panning it garnered. It is, at its core, loyal to the basic tenets of the original Gauntlet: run through mazes, kill hordes of enemies, find some keys, unlock some doors, beat the level, repeat. It’s all there. But as you get further and further in, your stomach drops as you realise it does nothing to evolve itself. Progression, variety, visuals, challenge - all of it has been wiped away for an experience that feels hollow almost from the jump. That boring, basic gameplay you begin with, that forms the bedrock of Dark Legacy IS the entire game. Gauntlet: Dark Legacy does the one thing worse than being an outright bad game - it’s a game that the more you play it, the more you feel you’re just wasting your time, because that’s exactly what it is.

A waste of time.

Rather than the top-down perspective that’s practically synonymous with Gauntlet, Dark Legacy puts you into an isometric perspective more similar to dungeon crawlers like Diablo. Dark Legacy retains the maze-like locales of the original Gauntlet, and each level tasks you with navigating through its long, endlessly branching hallways to find the exit, killing everything in your path, and in the case of a select few levels, collecting the Runestone (or, in english, McGuffin) that’ll help you unlock the final boss. The mazes are filled with dead ends, which usually have some kind of treasure - potions and power-ups to fortify your offense, or food to restore your health - and you’ll be spending most of your time running back and forth in search of the exit. You’ll stumble upon keys to open locked doors, which will either lead you towards the exit or treasure, but you’re never really needing to ration them as most locked doors lead to treasure with keys anyway. Kind of… kind of weird, actually.

Each level is filled to the brim with a random assortment of biome-specific enemies, who do little but rush towards you to beat you to death with their bare hands. Combating them is incredibly basic, with your only main attack being the ability to shoot projectiles at distant enemies, and hack away at ones that reach arms length, all with one button! It’s not as fast, not as bombastic, and a little bit… emptier than the original Gauntlet, but it is at least Gauntlet in one form or another. Dark Legacy facade is a simple, basic dungeon crawling experience - not great, but not bad. It’s evocative of, but still less interesting then the tried-and-true, no-hold barred experience that Gauntlet was, but Dark Legacy’s facade is solid enough.

Because there really is something innately satisfying about working your way through a level of Dark Legacy at first. Pitiful enemies crumble against your endless advance, and there’s a genuine, low-resolution power fantasy to be had. Sure, those first couple of levels were quite boring, but I’m certain there’ll be newer, more complex enemies to deal with, and traps and little puzzles to engage with as the game wears on to help the mazes from growing too same-ey. I’m sure it’ll get tougher and more exciting, and the boss fights at the end of each zone will push the combat system to it’s much-needed heights.

And okay, sure, the movement *is* a little bit slow, drawing out levels way more than they had any right to be. And yeah, my chosen character (The Archer, in my playthrough) might be a little basic in her skillset, but it’s early days! Every dungeon crawling action RPG starts slow as you build your momentum for an exciting, bombastic endgame. Wandering the maze might be unexciting, but maybe you’ll be able to teleport like in Diablo 2, or speed down corridors! Just imagine how good that’ll feel!

No, for a few levels, you might be fooled into thinking that Gauntlet: Dark Legacy does have something going for it, and that having one of the lowest metacritic scores for any GBA game is just some sort of mass critic delusion. Well, if Dark Legacy provided anything beyond that initial experience - and I mean, ANYTHING, maybe I’d agree with that idea.

Treadmill To Nowhere

Dark Legacy’s simplicity is quaint and comfy at first, but as the game wears on, nothing grows from its desolate foundation. The game feels like the ultimate deconstruction of what an action RPG can be. No, not in the way people rant that Madoka Magica is a deconstruction of magical girls; Dark Legacy strips pretty much anything interesting from something akin to Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance or The Lord of the Rings RPGs on the GBA. There is, for all intents and purposes, nothing to make you feel *good* in Dark Legacy longterm. There’s no loot to collect, no items to purchase, no real sense of progression to speak of in any real terms. Gold is lying all about the maze-like levels, but as far as I can tell, it just influences the score you’ll earn after hitting the end of the game, so it’s probably just here because piles of gold is just… Well, Gauntlet.

For god’s sake, even levelling up, the baseline of ANY game remotely similar to this, feels like a total non-factor. You’ll level up as you kill thousands upon thousands of mooks in your journey throughout, but the pace at which you level and the pace at which enemies grow stronger seems to be almost parallel, making it feel like you’re not really growing stronger at all. And with no skills to go with it? Already the game’s maze-like exploration grows stale within an hour; the satisfaction you had in the few first stages blowing through mooks is replaced by a horrid realisation that nothing ever changes, nothing will change, and that Gauntlet: Dark Legacy feels like nothing more than a waste of time.

The only saving grace the game could pull out at this point is at least having the small number of character classes you can play as feeling notably different, but even that hope is dashed away within moments. Archer, Wizard, Barbarian, Valkyrie - they are all essentially the same character. Some might attack a touch faster, but weaker, others slower but stronger, but every character’s strategy is the same; throw projectiles from afar, slap them around when you get close. I’m not asking for major, bespoke characters, but the cast is so, so similar to one another it feels like there aren’t any options beyond aesthetics. Even the handful of power-ups - which only function for a short time - aren’t anything interesting to write home about. Multiple extra projectiles, faster move speed, and potions that’ll just blast everything around you. Exciting stuff.

These power-ups are literally the only things you’ll be doing differently apart from the constant machine-gun fire of the moment-to-moment gameplay. Everything else is just a repetitive, boring sludge. No skills to learn, no combos to play with - hell, I’d barely call this combat half the time, with it feeling more akin to an isometric game of Space Invaders with how enemies approach you in waves. Only the boss encounters provide any real opposition to your unstoppable advance. Dark Legacy only saddles you with the most powerful, devastating opponents at the end of each zone, but if you steel yourself and master the ancient ability of slowly moving out of the way of slow projectiles before hitting them with attacks for… oh, thirty seconds? If you can do that, I think you’ll be okay. I believe in you. Seriously, though, the only benefit the boss stages really bring to the table is the fact that they’re significantly shorter then the normal stages. For those keeping score at home, that’s really, really, *really* bad.

Hey, why is the Genie boss caked up?

Blurry Labyrinths

Well, let’s be fair here. The homogenized gameplay of the playable cast can’t be that bad - I mean, it’s not like you can really tell *which* character you’re playing as. Gauntlet: Dark Legacy’s art-style isn’t terrible… or, it wouldn’t be, if I could identify an art-style within the blur of pixels and monochrome locales you’ll be running through over and over again. Characters and creatures alike are so small and pixelated it’s impossible to see any real detail, to the point even the Archer looked like she was just outright topless. N-Nice?

The lack of detail might not extend exactly to the game’s level aesthetics, but it's not much better. Despite the zones all being in different locales, they ultimately feel shallow and any real difference in them is a facade. Oh boy, I’m in an Egyption-themed level, time to run through the same narrow corridors as the last zone! What a stunning turn of events! I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing there’s a variety of designs to the zones, but when I’m essentially doing the same thing in them that’s already a drag, a change of scenery isn’t going to turn the pile of rotting milk into a four-course meal. This game is rigid; enemies might look different, the ground and walls might be a different colour, but Dark Legacy is essentially the exact same game in its first level as it is in the 28th. It is a treadmill of blurry, boring worlds and creatures that shows its hand instantly with literally nothing to tempt you further.

Not Your Dad's Gauntlet

But ultimately, I think Dark Legacy’s greatest sin is it’s just a bad follow-up to Gauntlet as a whole. The original Gauntlet was simple, and similar to the core conceit of this GBA successor… but at the same time, it’s everything Dark Legacy isn’t. Gauntlet was fast, responsive and exciting; each maze was a race to the finish, filled with hordes of enemies that look like they could drown the entire screen. It was the perfect co-op adventure, with a simple - but deeply satisfying - sense of progression that probably made it such a coin-cruncher in the first place. Even playing it on a PC emulator in my childhood, I could see that Gauntlet was something special.

Dark Legacy isn’t that. It’s slow. Unengaging. Stagnant. Even the fact that only a handful of enemies can spawn at time - and if you somehow get more than around ~10 enemies on screen at once, the game slows to a crawl like you’re knee-deep in the dead. Dark Legacy doesn’t just feel like a poor version of Gauntlet - it feels antithetical to everything Gauntlet was, and what made it so damn good.

Plus, the fact the game doesn’t even have any kind of multiplayer whatsoever - which, sure, was tough to really get going on anything that wasn’t a turn-based RPG like Pokemon - feels like some kind of cardinal sin for a Gauntlet game. And even if it isn’t really possible… why are you even making a Gauntlet game, then!?

Dark Legacy also joins the, heh, legacy of Game Boy Advance games that have next to no documentation of the web, period. The game really isn’t complicated to require the player to read it, but if you want to know what items do what, why certain pickups hurt and the different kinds of abilities and powerups lying around each level… Well, you’re out of luck. Plus, it feels like most of the plot would’ve been in the manual a’la a NES or SNES game, since anything presented in the plot is borderline nonsensical. Something about killing some generic dark lord? Couldn’t care less, personally. Every time I finished a set of levels, the mysterious statue-golem thing in the middle of the hub would babble stuff narrative magoo at me, and tell me that my quest was nearing an end… Considering there are four more hubs, I think that’s not quite accurate, no?

On a very, very basic level, Gauntlet Dark Legacy works as an action RPG. But with almost every RPG element either flat out removed, or watered down to almost pointlessness, you’re left with a slog of a game that does nothing evolve itself throughout. Sure, it’s got a decent amount of content, clocking in at around six, seven hours of gameplay, but what does that matter when it’s as mindless and exciting as watching paint dry? Hell, I love Musou games, and I couldn’t stomach more than a few hours of this!

Gauntlet: Dark Legacy is a failure of a game, and honestly sticks out as one of the worst “functional” games I’ve played in a while. The bones are there for something, but the ball has been dropped - or abandoned - on nearly every level. Progression, design, visuals, story and most importantly, the feel of the original Gauntlet, have been gutted. Above all, Gauntlet: Dark Legacy commits the greatest cardinal sin of all - it’s boring. I can only talk about what *isn’t* here, because what makes it up is so lacking and basic. Something like Elf or E.T was waaaay worse… but at least I can laugh at it. Dark Legacy, though? I just want to move on.

Thanks for reading my review of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy on the Game Boy Abyss! What a slogfest of a game, genuinely a snooze-inducing experience through and through. But, in any-case, whilst I sleep this off you can find me over at BlueSky @GameBoyAbyss, or email me at mgeorge7003@hotmail.com if you have any questions or requests! Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week.