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 started playing this game with an open mind - as one should when playing a game that's almost as old as I am on the ps1, a console not exactly known for its smooth controls. It's a delicate balance between reviewing a game keeping the time it came out in mind, and understanding that we have different standards in the current year and discussing the game in that light. I came out of this game pleasantly surprised. It still holds up really well for a game made two and a half decades ago, on a very old console.
Controls: Before you start playing this game, you'll want to change the control scheme to the more modern one on offer. It's pretty much the same as more modern FPS control schemes, but with a few catches: you have to stand still to aim, and aiming does not aim down the sights. It shows a crosshair that moves across the screen, temporarily changing your game into an arcade style shooter. The aiming is more or less smooth, and the aim assist is somewhat decent, which allows you to face the gauntlet that you'll be up against in the later parts of the game. The weapon swap is also very much a product of its time. You have to swap through a roster of four or five weapons that you're given to get a single weapon that you want. This includes grenades, which don't have a dedicated button. This isn't too bad, unless you're out of ammo and the next weapon you have is a bazooka, and you instinctively fire it and blow yourself up in the process. This predates something like the GTA weapon wheel.
Enemy design: There are multiple enemy types on tap here: riflemen, who have helmets that allow them to survive most headshots once before the helmet falls off and requires you to kill them with a second headshot. Submachine gunners, which can be absolutely ridiculous when paired with the level design. They can melt your health bar very quickly because they have a tendency to bum rush you and corner camp behind doors, so you can lose your entire health bar in a second after walking through the door. Finally, we have the panzerschrek users. These guys completely ruin some of the later levels, because they hide in dark corridors. The last thing you'll see is a rocket propelling towards you, and all of your progress through the mission is obliterated. I absolutely despise these enemies, and the game would be better if they were nerfed or taken out altogether. Luckily, half the time they fire their weapons, they end up killing themselves by accident. The enemy AI is intelligent to an extent, they can take cover, dive down, roll around, and zoom up to you like a Fortnite zoomer with ADHD. They can also throw grenades, but, like the panzerschrek users, they mostly just end up throwing grenades and running into them. The death animations are pretty cool too, though they can be distracting in crucial points of the game.
Graphics: They look good for a ps1 game. The animations do too. The lighting, however, is absolutely abysmal. You can't modify the brightness in the game itself, so you'll have to change the brightness on your TV because some of these levels can be pitch black since they're set at night. The draw distance is not helped by this either.
Difficulty: The difficulty curve on this game looks like a heartbeat monitor belonging to a meth head with cardiac arrhythmia. One mission can be disgustingly brutal, and the next could be an absolute breeze. The final two missions are a hilarious example of this. The second to last mission is one of the hardest in the game, with panzerschrek users and submachine gunners hiding behind every corner, requiring a ton of trial and error. The problem is, you'd think the final mission would be one last challenge to send off the experience. It's not. If you tried to properly play the mission by using the turret in the beginning and killing all the enemies, you'll get absolutely destroyed. In this regard, it's the hardest level in the game. However, this is completely optional. It's the easiest level in the game when you just saunter past the gauntlet of enemies, kill a few scientists, and then launch the rocket. I was baffled at how easy it was to skirt the "final boss", but I'm not complaining because that last gauntlet would've been ridiculously hard to beat.
Level Design: You have to do objectives to get past the levels. If you don't, and try to leave the level before finishing the objectives, you'll have to restart the entire thing. Why they didn't just prevent you from walking through is beyond me. The objectives usually just involve blowing something up, picking up some papers, or killing a certain type of enemy. It's like Goldeneye but slightly dumbed down. I think it adds a good amount of depth to the game, because you keep your eyes peeled for the next objective and it lets you use your imagination to fill in the narrative blanks that are in the game due to its age. Some of the levels don't benefit from their age though, because many of the areas look exactly the same and loop within each other. Sometimes the only way to progress is through a grate near the floor that's covered entirely in darkness. There will be times when you're wandering around for a while. There are no mid-mission checkpoints either, which is a frustrating relic of the fifth and sixth generations of gaming. If you die, you're going back to the start. Luckily missions are fairly short.
Story: Almost nonexistent. You're Steven Spielberg's World War II fan-fic OC Jimmy Patterson, who is good at literally everything, from killing Natzees to theoretical physics. You go through a series of episodic missions, which have you sabotaging certain pieces of the German war machine, such as the V2 rocket or the D2O reserves for their atomic bombs in Norway. It's a very standard World War II game.
Overall, I would've docked it two points for this dated design, but it gets half a point because it keeps score of how many times you can shoot enemies in the dick. Sovl. If you don't mind some old jank, give this game a shot. It's pretty fun and memorable.