Gauntlet Slayer Edition: This series has run its course

It pains me to say this because I have been a fan of this franchise for a looooooong time; Since 1985 to be exact when the first 4-player arcade game that I am aware of appeared in our local Dairy Queen and instantly started to suck up all of my quarters.

I wasn't even aware that Gauntlet: Slayer Edition existed until it popped up on the Playstation store for the absurdly low price of $3. I played it for about 30 minutes and I guess you could say that I got my money's worth out of it but nah, I'm not gonna complete this game - this much I am certain of.

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Unfortunately, the game has nothing to do with Slayer, the band. That would have been pretty wild and I would imagine those guys could use the money. Warner Bros Entertainment made this game and I was unaware that they were actually in the business of making games... I would be willing to bet that they simply pay smaller studios to do the game and then claim that they did it.

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This game is exactly what you would expect a Gauntlet game to be so that much is not a surprise. There is a story there but it doesn't really matter. The game is simply a hack-and-slash game dungeon crawler of sorts where the game becomes more difficult the further your progress into the levels. There are 4 sub-sections of sorts but honestly, there isn't a great deal of variety and the way the game functions gets kinda old really fast.

You basically enter a room, the door mysteriously locks behind you, and you cant progress until you have killed everything in said room. The enemies that spawn in the rooms will never cease to spawn until you have destroyed whatever these things are called.

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In the short amount of time that I was playing it, I managed to make it to the first boss, which was really the only interesting thing about the game, sadly. Apparently, there are 4 more of these and I'm afraid it just wasn't interesting enough for me to carry on.

I didn't ever try as all of the characters but from what I could determine playing as the elf seems to be the easiest since you have the greatest range and can just fire endlessly as you back away from the endless horde of oncoming skeletons and mummies.

I think the game was designed to be played in multiplayer and that was an option that I never explored because I can't really see how that would enhance the game a great deal since from what I have read the only thing that changes is that the game is going to throw twice as many enemies at you to compensate for the additional help.

You get swarmed frequently because there are so many trash mobs on the screen at once that avoiding this is all but impossible. I can't even imagine how many enemies there would be if I was to introduce 3 more teammates. I can only presume that every single room would be completely full of mobs right when you enter.

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The same 4 choices that have existed since the game's inception back in 1985 are the choices that are available in this one as well. I suppose I can applaud that.

For $3 I suppose you could do worse than this, especially if you are looking for an extremely casual game that you can play with strangers on the internet. The major problem is that this game has been around for nearly 40 years and honestly, I don't know what else they could do to make it better. Even at $3, I probably won't get any of these in the future.