Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows

released on Dec 12, 2005

Gauntlet is back for yet another iteration. The Emperor has crucified his four loyal heroes to a magic tree, driven by a maniac thirst for their immortality. Hundreds of years later, as only a ghost, he came to regret all the wrong deeds he has done and frees them, asking them to defeat his six former advisors in an attempt to undo what he has done. This version of Gauntlet goes back to the roots: The warrior, valkyrie, elf, and wizard fight their way through hordes of enemies to make their way to the six bosses. The game is mostly a hack'n'slash affair, puzzles are limited to finding keys and pressing buttons that open doors and portals. Every character has a unique set of moves and attacks: The warrior has rather powerful attacks, the valkyrie has quick moves, the elf can shoot powerful arrows, and the wizard has several magical range attacks. Defeating enemies gives you experience points that may be used to increase your three stats; some chests in the levels contain better armor or weapons. Also, new moves can be purchased with gold. The game can be played both in single-player as well as cooperative multi-player, where up to four players fight together. The newest feature of this game (other than the much better graphics) is the online gaming feature. Played online, the game is identical to a regular multiplayer game, with each player on a different box.


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I was unfortunate enough to have played through two very, very bad sequels to two very good games this past weekend. The other was Medal of Honor: Underground. I feel like the Angry Video Game Nerd.
Gauntlet: Dark Legacy was a perfection of the Gauntlet formula that was built over the course of 15 years, starting with Gauntlet 1985. It was jam-packed full of engaging content that was extremely fun and oozing charm and soul. It was extremely fun both in single-player and co-op. Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows takes everything Gauntlet: Dark Legacy perfected and throws it in the garbage in favor of creating a soulless hack and slash with terrible combat, a lackluster story, and very little fun.
To start: the presentation. The graphics are much better than those of Dark Legacy and the games before it. However, the art style is bland compared to Dark Legacy. It looks and plays like a generic fantasy game from the era. The music is also fairly mediocre. It has some decent points, but it kind of just blends into the background. The sound design is horrendous. I don't usually notice this kind of thing in games, but it undercuts the entire weight of the combat. Most of the time, weapons sound like wet farts blowing in the wind. They barely make any substantial noises, making you feel like you're slashing at the air. It also makes you forget that you're actually taking damage, because it looks and feels like you haven't been hit but half your health bar vanishes into thin air within seconds due to a lack of feedback. The game is sure to remind you that you've gotten hit, with the narrator saying "[class] needs food badly" and all of the sound in the game completely bottoms out. It's very annoying.
The story is your standard dark fantasy story. It's mid. Just like most of the game. Basically this emperor is manipulated into chaining his heroes to a tree by these treacherous advisors. It almost reminds me of the story for the Overlord games, but without any of the charm, soul, or humor. If you haven't played Overlord, you should play that instead of this piece of crap. It's a really good game.
The gameplay has some things that it does better than the Gauntlet formula, but it's not really "Gauntlet", if that makes sense. It's just a mediocre hack and slash. There are actual combos you can do now, as opposed to walking up to the enemy and smacking them until they're dead. The ranged attacks do jack squat in terms of damage now, however, making it far more viable to do melee and spam magic. There are now also magic attacks besides the AoE spell. There is nothing stopping you from spamming these attacks with the directional button, because they take very little mana to cast and are far more effective than melee and ranged attacks. However, the aforementioned combos are very bland. The classes also have more meaningful differences than in the previous games, which more or less based their class designs on aesthetics and stat caps. The classes now have different "feels" and different combos you can learn. I played as an elf, which feels like you're playing a Dollar General version of Legolas. This was probably intentional, because Return of the King came out a few years before this hunk of junk. These "improvements" are not worth the gutting out of the core of the game, which mostly focuses on ranged combat with some melee combat in certain scenarios and is more stat-focused. The leveling up in this game is also not nearly as quick as it should be. The game is mercifully short, only about 5 hours, yet the levels are very long and very bland. You only get one or two levels at most with each mission in the late game, despite going up to level 99. You don't feel like you're progressing much in terms of character build. This isn't helped that when you run out of lives, you lose all of the experience that you got throughout the level. This is bad game design. It essentially turns that attempted run into a waste of time. This wouldn't be an issue if the levels were shorter, but there is a substantial amount of time that was wasted when you die. There are weapon and armor pickups that drastically increase your stats, but they're few and far between. This wouldn't be an issue if the game weren't short, but I'm not exactly itching to play more of this trash. Unlike Dark Legacy, this game is not properly designed to be played solo and co-op. There are sections of this game that were clearly designed with co-op in mind, and the entire game is much better when you have someone else to suffer through it with you. It's bland when you play it co-op, and downright miserable when you play it solo.
The bosses are pretty bad. They're all more or less the same, they do a small AoE in a circle, or they do a big AoE in a straight line. The only way to really beat them is to spam your d-pad moves and throw yourself into their meat grinder until they're dead. It's not very fun or well-designed because they can stunlock you into a coma. Since this is Gauntlet's first real hack and slash game, there are no ways to really stunlock bosses to prevent this or dodge out of the way in time, like you'd find in better hack and slash games.
As for content, this game is very short, as stated before. I would normally have no issue with this, because unlike people such as Angry Joe, who have contributed to a dialog which led to bloated games, I know that a long game is not necessarily a good game. That being said, a short game would benefit greatly from replay value and unlockables. Aside from difficulties, this game has no unlockables or fun skins to play with. Dark Legacy had plenty of replay value and secret classes to play with, as well as atmosphere that kept me coming back for more. And one playthrough of that game takes about 40 hours!
Overall, this is a pretty bad game. I had nostalgia for this game after having played it a lot as a kid, but it's just not good. Like I said before, I'm tough, but fair. Give this game a shot if you want, but don't expect something very fun.

I wanted this game to be so good that for a long time I lied to myself and said it was.... this game definitly wasn't.

This is a good, if not generic entry to the Gauntlet series. It's fun, but it just doesn't stick with you as much as a lot of the previous entries do. The music and cutscenes are better though, and I like how all the chests and gold have similar sound effects to what they had in the retro games. I've always had fun with this one, but it just isn't my go-to Gauntlet game. This game is dirt cheap for all systems, so it's definitely worth buying if you can find it.

Not the worst beat em up ive played

Played this co-op with my Dad and went harddd, people hate but had a great time on it