Platinuming this game made me remember how frustrating the base game was. Pros: the graphics and gameplay are a step up from AC2, there were mechanics in the gameplay that were new to the series that made the side content more engaging and plentiful, there were more gadgets to play with, the missions themselves were more varied, and full sync missions were a good idea on paper and ended up being implemented better later on in the series. Cons: the objectives were extremely restrictive, the full sync was far too demanding and restrictive for something that still had the awkward movement of the first two games, and the story ended up feeling like a filler arc between 2 and Revelations. Overall, I would've rated it 3.5 but the DaVinci Disappearance ended up being so much better than the main story that this game gets a 4 out of 5.

Infuriating, cryptic level design is the name of the game here, with some downright maddening levels towards the end where your guns are rendered useless and you have to fight some insanely difficult enemies with just your lightsaber. The story is also of questionable quality, since the actual "meat" of the plot only happens in the last hour or so of the game, and the rest of it is Kyle fighting stormtroopers and Mara going off to do a mission for Jabba's successor to secure supplies for the new republic. It gets three stars because it's more Dark Forces 2, however, because Dark Forces 2 is a great game.

A legendary (no pun intended) game, but aged very poorly compared to the other two in the trilogy. It's still a good game, but the level design is horrendous and tedious and the gameplay is generally very clunky compared to the sequels. Certain staples of this series, such as dual wielding, vehicle hijacking, and the more snappy melee combat system, are not present in this game. As someone who is nostalgic for this game and has played through it countless times since the early 2000s, I have to say that anyone who thinks this one is the best in the series is on crack.

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.

This was a pretty good game for the Halloween season.
The thumb stick-based combat wasn't as bad as, say, Too Human, but I'm glad that game developers left the thumbsticks alone when it came to combat after a certain point. It was kind of annoying in this game, it was annoying in Too Human, and it was annoying in Metal Gear Rising with its left stick parrying mechanics.
The combat is overall very simplistic and is mostly in service to the puzzle based gameplay. Most of the time the puzzles involve strategically selecting weapons and power-ups to work around the challenges presented, such as not killing a certain type of enemy of killing every enemy within the time limit. These start off simple before getting brutally difficult in chapter 3.
You can tell this game had a fairly troubled development because the design is extremely linear and room to room rather than the more open pseudo-metroidvania of something like Resident Evil. It feels like it settled on the former because it didn't have the development time to create the latter, and that's fine by me. This game is great because it's short and sweet, a longer and more open experience would make it more of a slog.
The atmosphere is very cartoonish and aged well. The soundtrack is your standard goofy, spooky style of music with some absolute bangers like the main theme and the ballroom theme. The game is very funny as well. Even though this is an E rated game, it's filled with dirty jokes that would fly over a kid's head. The name of the game itself is a double entendre, and there are scenes like Cooper giving Amber the ointment to cure her disfigurement (if you played this part you know what I'm talking about). It's not all dirty though, there's plenty of slapstick, wordplay, and absurdity.
The reason I docked points from this game was that it was brutally difficult in chapter 3 and chapter 4, though chapter 4 was basically just the final boss. It was extremely frustrating, but luckily the difficulty drastically decreased in chapter 5 after beating the final boss, who was the last big hurdle to jump through before your victory lap, saving all the captives.
Overall, this is a pretty good game to play during spooky season. Would recommend, but only if you're up for an extremely difficult challenge towards the end.