First Impressions: “Red Warrior needs food badly!”
Gauntlet Dark Legacy is the expansion/pseudo-sequel to the late-90s hit, Gauntlet Legends. If that sounds familiar, it is because Gauntlet Legends was ported to both the Playstation and Nintendo 64. The N64 version was particularly memorable as a brilliant four-player experience. The core concept of Dark Legacy is two decades old, originating from the arcade hit, Gauntlet. In Dark Legacy, you will be able to choose between eight initial character classes, including the classic four from the originals; the Warrior, Valkyrie, Wizard, and Archer. Joining them are character classes such as the Dwarf, Jester, Knight, and Sorceress as well as several classes that must be unlocked.
You and up to four friends will be able to create characters from one of the available classes, choose from a variety of costume colors, name them, and save them independently. Available to you are a variety of worlds, each with a decent selection of different stages, to explore and plunder. These worlds come in various flavors, including mountains, deserts, forests, castles, ice lands, towns, a sky world, and a dream world. Hundreds of monsters will be around for your party to dispose of as they continually spew from countless “monster generators." Along the way you will collect gold for purchasing defensive and offensive power-ups, keys for unlocking doors and chests, and magical potions to use throughout your travels.
As in Gauntlet Legends, each of the main character classes will start the game with a unique balance of statistics and combat specializations. Each character will also features his/her own special combos, magical attacks, and turbo attacks. Consequently, each character will cater to a different style of play. As you progress in your adventure you will be given the opportunity to advance your character's statistics, giving you the ability to customize your character as you see fit. What makes Gauntlet unique is that you do have the opportunity to save your characters independent of the rest of your party. You can form parties of up to four characters from amongst any character saved on your memory card, adding to the replay extensively. Your characters are not “locked” into a quest with their current adventuring party.
The next generation hardware facilitates the implementation of four characters at once. With the Gamecube supporting the four-player adventure right out of the box. Hopefully we will be seeing some new features for the GCN port of the game. Possibly in the form of new characters or new stages and worlds. What we know we will be getting are enhanced, anti-aliased graphics locked at a slick 60 FPS. The game is expected to arrive as early as the 1st of March of this year, and will be a grand addition to your multiplayer library. Hardcore Gauntlet fans might just appreciate it as a stand-alone single player experience as well.
