Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows ::
by William the Bloody
The game premise: There was an emperor who relied on the council of the Four Immortals (The Wizard, Valkyrie, Warrior, and Elf), but he was duped into betraying them by his six advisors. They tricked the king into crucifying the Immortals on a magic tree, and then they absorbed some of their powers into themselves and became horrific monstrosities of evil who now lay waste to the land. The king realized what a terrible thing he had done, but could not oppose his six ultra-powerful advisors on his own, so he freed the Immortals from the tree and begs them to take down the six so that the land may be peaceful and good once again. You know, or something...
The Good: The gameplay graphics are pretty freaking great. Nothing looks angular and the active characters fit in with the backgrounds and cast shadows, which is always nice. The bad guys have really well programmed AI, too. There is a level where you have two types of bad guys to fight, ogres and palace guards, and while both don't like you, they also don't like each other, so some fight you while others fight amongst themselves, which is pretty cool. I also dig that occasionally defeated bad guys will turn into food. This was a handy change from other Gauntlet games. The music was really good and sounded close to a movie score and not cheesy video-game-like.
The Bad: Quite a lot, actually. Other than using the typical Gauntlet characters, this game bears little resemblance to the Gauntlet world. For starters, you no longer have to collect keys and potions; chests readily open by pressing R1 and you can drop a potion with R2 if you have enough magic, some people may think this is am improvement, but I think it takes a little bit of strategy from the game. There aren't any treasure rooms or special amulets (limited invisibility, reflective shot, etc). Now the biggest, most disturbing upset for me is the fact that the bad guys no longer REQUIRE generators to appear! SOME of them do, but villains will also scale cliffs and drop down from vines to come at you. What the hell? Gauntlet isn't supposed to work like that! Everybody knows that in Gauntlet bad guys spring from generators, so if you destroy all generators, there will be no more baddies, but not so in this game. This really pissed me off like you would not believe. This game also suffers for being REALLY short. You know going in that there are only six bosses, and each have an average of three levels of gameplay preceding them, and these are levels that you can beat in under ten minutes each, guaranteed. I ran through this entire game TWICE in less than half the time in took me to play Dark Legacy. Once again, the camera is fixed and this was a bad decision. Being able to manually change the camera angle would have made me loads happier with this game, but no.
Overall, this game sucked. I love Gauntlet so much and was hoping since Dark Legacy rocked that this would only be an expansion of the awesomeness, but was grossly mistaken. Where Dark Legacy improved Gauntlet by leaps and bounds, Seven Sorrows dragged it kicking and screaming to a watery grave. It was relatively fun to play, I just wish they hadn't put the Gauntlet name on it and sold it under a new moniker. This all too fast and pretty damn easy and an experienced gamer could easily beat this in one solid afternoon. I would recommended this for a rental but definitely not to own.
C+
