Sabreman must search out the lost sections of the Wulf amulet in this colourful flick screen maze game whilst fighting off the many beasts, and the Wulf itself, that inhabit the jungle before making his final escape.
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THIS SHIT IS ASS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this game fucking sucks. At least the other ones are at least intuitive and easy to figure out this one just fucking sucks its just NOTHING ITS NOTHING TO ME
Okay so you know Atic Atac, that I just reviewed like 10 minutes ago?
Well what if we took that game, made your attack much weaker, the environment even more confusing in a jungle, sped you the hell up, gave you traction so bad it'd make Luigi blush, and instead of a silly bounce off the walls attack you only had a pitiful sword with no range? Oh, and instead of health and being able to take hits, you just had 5 lives and we called it a day.
Horrid game, but at least the studio has learned from it. I like the title music at least.
Well what if we took that game, made your attack much weaker, the environment even more confusing in a jungle, sped you the hell up, gave you traction so bad it'd make Luigi blush, and instead of a silly bounce off the walls attack you only had a pitiful sword with no range? Oh, and instead of health and being able to take hits, you just had 5 lives and we called it a day.
Horrid game, but at least the studio has learned from it. I like the title music at least.
Atic Atac in the jungle. The rainbow vomit look works better here since jungles are supposed to be colorful, but it's still just a basic maze game.
Another maze game. Here you have to find four pieces of an amulet hidden throughout a very vast map, with lots of twisting passages. This is not a map you’ll learn, so you’ll mainly just pick random directions until you find what you need. Then you need to head to the centre of the map.
Everything in the jungle is out to get you, and you only have a piddly sword. Most enemies can be vanquished easily, but larger ones you’ll need to dodge (or have to lose a life if you need to get past them). There are also villagers that you can block by fighting, but you’ll need to back up on yourself to get past them.
Orchids will sprout up, each with different abilities. Two of these are detrimental, such as knocking you down or reversing your directions, while others will make you invincible (but either slow you down or speed you up). The white one will reset any effects.
Sabre Wulf isn’t a bad game, but is still a fairly frustrating one. The snapshots are tailored well and show how fun some of the gameplay can be, but it feels more like blindly stumbling around rather than the working out and planning of Atic Atac.
I completed the main game once, and then took on the snapshots, which for some of them seemed more about being lucky with the randomness more than anything else.
Everything in the jungle is out to get you, and you only have a piddly sword. Most enemies can be vanquished easily, but larger ones you’ll need to dodge (or have to lose a life if you need to get past them). There are also villagers that you can block by fighting, but you’ll need to back up on yourself to get past them.
Orchids will sprout up, each with different abilities. Two of these are detrimental, such as knocking you down or reversing your directions, while others will make you invincible (but either slow you down or speed you up). The white one will reset any effects.
Sabre Wulf isn’t a bad game, but is still a fairly frustrating one. The snapshots are tailored well and show how fun some of the gameplay can be, but it feels more like blindly stumbling around rather than the working out and planning of Atic Atac.
I completed the main game once, and then took on the snapshots, which for some of them seemed more about being lucky with the randomness more than anything else.
Obtuse and frustrating.
I’m not exactly sure why, but I have been very intrigued by the lineup of games made by Rare, or Ultimate Play the Game as they were known as, in their earliest years. For most of my life, I had only known Rare as… well, Rare, the company known for making Banjo-Kazooie, Battletoads, and Conker, all games that I respect/love for their own individual reasons. But then, upon the release of Rare Replay for the Xbox One, I was then introduced to the Ultimate Play the Game era of Rare, and while it wasn’t as iconic or appealing as Rare’s modern-ish lineup, it was pretty interesting to see where they were in comparison to where they are now. So, ever since then, I have dabbled into Ultimate Play the Game’s lineup from time to time, and I’m glad I did, because I discovered some new favorites from the company, like Jetpac and Jetpac Refuelled. But then I also discovered some of their missteps, including today’s topic, Sabre Wulf.
Alongside Jetpac, Sabre Wulf can be seen as one of Rare’s (or Ultimate-Too-Long-Name’s) earliest franchises, and I was looking forward to checking it out, as I really liked Jetpac, so I figured that I would have a similar experience with this game. BOY, was I wrong! Yeah, this game sucks, which is a shame, considering that there does seem to be a good game hidden in here somewhere, but it is buried underneath a bunch of trial and error bullshit, along with a lack of proper direction and semblance to help guide the player. Sure, I am well aware that this was the intention of the game, but just because it was intended, that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
The story is just basically your average explorer Indiana-Jones plot in the simplest way possible, the graphics are ZX spectrum graphics, which are very colorful, but not too appealing to look at after a while, the music (and by that, I mean the only two tracks) are… fine, I guess, the control is pretty good, although your movement speed is a little too fast for me at some points, and the gameplay is very simple and appealing, but frustrating and monotonous upon execution.
The game is your average before-Zelda-adventure game, where you take control of Sabreman (which is one of the coolest names a protagonist has ever had), run through a tropical maze of plants, caves, and water, defeating or avoiding enemies, getting powerups/downs along the way, and collecting pieces of an amulet to reach the underworld. It all sounds pretty simple, and yeah, it is, but like most of these old school games, the main problems start when you actually try to play the game. The game relies primarily on trial and error for difficulty, where as you explore this pretty big world to find these amulet pieces, enemies will be thrown at you constantly in all available directions, which wouldn’t be so bad, but there are plenty of moments where you will just be unable to take out the enemy you are faced with, with either the enemy being unkillable, or they are placed either above or below you, and you can only attack to your left or right.
Like I mentioned earlier, you do get powerups that can help you in the form of these different colored flowers, which can give you various different abilities, such as a faster running speed and temporary invincibility, but sometimes they can also provide detriments, such as reversing your controls, which does also play a part in the trial and error aspects of how you can comfortably progress through the game. And finally, the pieces of the amulet that you have to find are placed randomly in this maze upon every startup, which means that you will need to search all over the place every time to find where these pieces end up. While I do appreciate this for making every playthrough somewhat different each time, given what you have to deal with in the process of finding these pieces, I would honestly rather not. With all of these aspects bunched together, along with the addition of having limited lives and having to start over all the way at the beginning every time you get a game over, it comes together to bring a confusing and bothersome experience.
Honestly, it does upset me that I ended up not liking this game, because from looking at it, it looks like a game that I would love to play. The fast pace and the random nature of the game is something that I would normally love in any other game, as it keeps things interesting and fun with each playthrough, and the look of it is also very inviting, at least to me. Despite that, the random nature of enemy spawns and item placement was definitely not fit for a game like this. Not to mention, the look of it is also very inviting, at least to me. If there was a little more there to give the player more of an edge, I would probably be singing a much different tune.
Also, you wanna know something funny? When you actually find all the pieces of the amulet, and you reach the end of the game (spoilers for an almost 40 year old game, but whatever), the game ends with a cliffhanger, telling you to purchase the next game in the series, Underwurlde. It makes sense, given how the other games in the series were developed in advance before this one was released, but even still, that has gotta be the biggest middle-finger from a company in a game ending I have ever seen so far, and I can’t help but kind of love it.
Overall, while it does have the appeal and charm that was there in Jetpac, the same can’t be said for the gameplay, and the reliance on trial and error and randomness almost completely ruins the experience for me. Let’s just hope that Underwurlde and the other games after that stay far away from this type of approach to gameplay, but something in my gut tells me that may not be the case.
Game #157
Alongside Jetpac, Sabre Wulf can be seen as one of Rare’s (or Ultimate-Too-Long-Name’s) earliest franchises, and I was looking forward to checking it out, as I really liked Jetpac, so I figured that I would have a similar experience with this game. BOY, was I wrong! Yeah, this game sucks, which is a shame, considering that there does seem to be a good game hidden in here somewhere, but it is buried underneath a bunch of trial and error bullshit, along with a lack of proper direction and semblance to help guide the player. Sure, I am well aware that this was the intention of the game, but just because it was intended, that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
The story is just basically your average explorer Indiana-Jones plot in the simplest way possible, the graphics are ZX spectrum graphics, which are very colorful, but not too appealing to look at after a while, the music (and by that, I mean the only two tracks) are… fine, I guess, the control is pretty good, although your movement speed is a little too fast for me at some points, and the gameplay is very simple and appealing, but frustrating and monotonous upon execution.
The game is your average before-Zelda-adventure game, where you take control of Sabreman (which is one of the coolest names a protagonist has ever had), run through a tropical maze of plants, caves, and water, defeating or avoiding enemies, getting powerups/downs along the way, and collecting pieces of an amulet to reach the underworld. It all sounds pretty simple, and yeah, it is, but like most of these old school games, the main problems start when you actually try to play the game. The game relies primarily on trial and error for difficulty, where as you explore this pretty big world to find these amulet pieces, enemies will be thrown at you constantly in all available directions, which wouldn’t be so bad, but there are plenty of moments where you will just be unable to take out the enemy you are faced with, with either the enemy being unkillable, or they are placed either above or below you, and you can only attack to your left or right.
Like I mentioned earlier, you do get powerups that can help you in the form of these different colored flowers, which can give you various different abilities, such as a faster running speed and temporary invincibility, but sometimes they can also provide detriments, such as reversing your controls, which does also play a part in the trial and error aspects of how you can comfortably progress through the game. And finally, the pieces of the amulet that you have to find are placed randomly in this maze upon every startup, which means that you will need to search all over the place every time to find where these pieces end up. While I do appreciate this for making every playthrough somewhat different each time, given what you have to deal with in the process of finding these pieces, I would honestly rather not. With all of these aspects bunched together, along with the addition of having limited lives and having to start over all the way at the beginning every time you get a game over, it comes together to bring a confusing and bothersome experience.
Honestly, it does upset me that I ended up not liking this game, because from looking at it, it looks like a game that I would love to play. The fast pace and the random nature of the game is something that I would normally love in any other game, as it keeps things interesting and fun with each playthrough, and the look of it is also very inviting, at least to me. Despite that, the random nature of enemy spawns and item placement was definitely not fit for a game like this. Not to mention, the look of it is also very inviting, at least to me. If there was a little more there to give the player more of an edge, I would probably be singing a much different tune.
Also, you wanna know something funny? When you actually find all the pieces of the amulet, and you reach the end of the game (spoilers for an almost 40 year old game, but whatever), the game ends with a cliffhanger, telling you to purchase the next game in the series, Underwurlde. It makes sense, given how the other games in the series were developed in advance before this one was released, but even still, that has gotta be the biggest middle-finger from a company in a game ending I have ever seen so far, and I can’t help but kind of love it.
Overall, while it does have the appeal and charm that was there in Jetpac, the same can’t be said for the gameplay, and the reliance on trial and error and randomness almost completely ruins the experience for me. Let’s just hope that Underwurlde and the other games after that stay far away from this type of approach to gameplay, but something in my gut tells me that may not be the case.
Game #157