Gauntlet

released on Sep 23, 2014

The classic Gauntlet 4-player co-op action gameplay returns in a completely new experience! Play as one of four distinct heroes in an intense monster filled dungeon brawler with a combination of both uniquely built and randomly generated levels to explore. Battle the endless hordes of foes as you and your friends fight for treasure and glory via both local and online co-op multiplayer.


Also in series

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows
Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows
Gauntlet Dark Legacy
Gauntlet Dark Legacy
Gauntlet Legends
Gauntlet Legends
Gauntlet IV
Gauntlet IV
Gauntlet III: The Final Quest
Gauntlet III: The Final Quest

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Gauntlet is a decent blast from the past if you've got friends to play with! It captures the arcadey hack-and-slash fun of the original with some updated visuals. Thing is, it does get old pretty fast – the levels feel repetitive, and there's not a ton of depth in the gameplay. It's a fun nostalgia trip for a couple of hours, but there are much better co-op dungeon crawlers out there.

I was gifted this by a streaming friend who wanted to try this out on stream with a few friends to help him out so I did receive it free, purely in the form of a gift and not as some-kind of sponsorship by the developers. That said, I will be honest about this game and what it has for any curious buyers out there.

At first I wasn't certain what to think about this game as it looks like your generic dungeon crawler with similar generic characters, but how they control is quite different. My friends had played The Barbarian, Elf and Necromancer. The last one being, in my opinion way too expensive for simply an additional character.

We had a lot of fun figuring out the controls as we were using voice chat in discord and the character's sarcastic and dismissive comments were hilarious. Your characters can heal up by eating food, but if someone destroys it often either the one who brought you here, Morak, says something sarcastic or one of the characters do. Along the lines of "The warrior destroyed the food. I'm sure he had his reasons." and other slightly personalised ones based on the characters.

Playing as the wizard was, as you can imagine, more complicated than it appears. The buttons on the controller corresponded to an element (You start with three. Fire, Ice, Lightning) that you combine to make certain spell effects. For example, ice and fire creates a ball of ice projectile that chills an areas, slowing creatures down, ice and lightning creates a short blast of ice, fire and ice creates a ball of fire you can lob as a bomb, fire and lightning lets you turn into twin-balls of flame that shoot forward through enemies. As you gain gold you can buy more spellbooks to replace one of the elements, but only one, with something like hellfire or void magic. These create their own effects for interesting combos that can create all kinds of secondary of DoT effects.

Back to the gameplay...you soon find yourself disliking your friends if you take this game too seriously because gold isn't shared between the party. The one with the most gold is usually the one that runs headfirst into the piles of coins that they can see so if you and your friends are a bit too serious, this game might infuriate you at times. Especially if you have the one friend who nabs all the gold.

Personally we were just having fun and the items that you can buy often don't really give you enhancements, but rather, alternatives to the abilities you have or numerous different cosmetics to your character to make them look kinda cool or badass. Whatever you like! So hoarding the gold doesn't really hinder the other players too much, unless there's an ability that they want that aids their playstyle and the one who ends the game with the most gold is always called out by the game as "The Greediest Player" so there's that too.

The combat is like that of a twin-stick shooter with most enemies who are fairly one-dimensional enemies until you get much deeper. Where first you encounter bosses that are essentially much larger mobs with devastating attacks, then you get to the shard guardians as you are meant to retrieve the three shards for this mysterous deity-like character, Morak.

The first shard guardian was hard, but fun! It was immortal until you work as a team to activate a switch that exposes it's weak point.

The second shard guardian was a absolute disappointment. It was just a very large mob with nothing else really going for.

The third and final boss was just aggrevating! Without spoilers, it summoned endless minions from various floors of the dungeon (more powerful the weaker they got), then you had to attack them, however, they create multiple copies so you have to guess and find the right one. Not to mention as it gets weaker, the sword decides now would be a good time to start randomly attacking you, often killing players with one-hit KOs!

Every class has a selection of personal achievements that add to their gold pile and this dungeon can be re-done multiple times, but for essentially the exact same story so I didn't feel much of a reason to return to this after our streaming had ended.

Really bucking fun through the first levels of the camping, but somehow gets progressively boring. 4 player Co-Op is a must the get the best out of this game.

A pretty super redesign of a classic. The wizard is wild.