It was once again my turn to talk about my favorite Gauls: Asterix and Obelix, for the second time since I have been in this writing and each time I have to describe one of the productions which has them as protagonists, not only nostalgia. surrounds me but the certainty that I will be confronted with a title which, at least, will have immense respect for the franchise. In the case of Asterix & Obelix Slap Them All, which is the game I am going to analyze today, I was not wrong.
You see, for me the Asterix, Obélix and Ideafix games have accompanied me through the generations of consoles, since this Master System title, without neglecting Asterix & Obélix XXL and many other deliveries that have never disappointed me. However, my favorite title of the duo has always been Asterix: The Arcade Game which has taken our beloved protagonists away from mechanical platforms to put them in the purest beat them, a genre that Konami, those responsible for this development, knew by heart, it suffices to recall the magnificent work that they also knew how to do with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles during the 90s among many others.
Mr. Nutz, the development studio in charge of Slap Them All, and Microides they managed to bring the magic of it beat them to modernity, giving the production some truly exquisite graphics and sounds without neglecting some details of this old Konami production, like the way the characters walk and move on the stages.
As for the story, the game brings together in six well-defined acts, several of the best adventures of the characters of René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo as Asterix and the Vikings, Asterix between Bretons and Asterix and Cleopatra without a central wire that unites the acts or a mission specific that connects the story from the first to the sixth.
Reload your potions, by Tutatis! We will need a lot of energy to keep the Romans, the pirates, the Vikings, the Egyptians at bay, in short, the maroons and the blows will not be lacking in this analysis.
Technical section
I’m sure the first thing that will catch your eye from the start will be the graphics, which are hand drawn and seem to be taken directly from Uderzo’s magic line to represent not only the protagonists of the game, but all the characters that are present. ; Common enemies, bosses and allies. Those who are fans of the comic strip where Asterix and Obelix were born will feel absolutely comfortable with all the characters that will appear in the story, some of them little known to the general public but who will surely make more of them. a smile. to the most loyal fans of the saga.
A detail that is not at all common in beat them and that, nevertheless, it is included here with an effect that struck me as brutal, and that is the detail of the damage that is inflicted on the characters. It is that as the soldiers fall victim to the fury of Asterix and Obelix, we will see how they lose their shields, their armor is damaged and even their teeth lose pieces, which seemed extremely original and fun.
The settings are also very well done with just brushstrokes and the exact level of detail that emulates that seen in the comics.
The soundtrack accompanies the phases with very varied melodies which give a different flavor to the production at each of its stages, including not so common instruments like the bagpipe in many songs. The sound effects are taken care of in detail, everyone feels very good and the conversation between the characters is very funny and perfectly interpreted. The script also did justice to the characters’ lore with many phrases typical of them.
The play is localized to the Spanish of Europe in the menus and in the narrative of the scenes, although this does not apply to the voices of the characters which will remain exclusively in English, although I repeat that the actors and actresses who have faced the different characters They did a great job and it shows.
Gameplay
We are here in front of a beat them pure strain, so if you like these me vs the neighborhood games, here you will feel right at home. For these types of games to work well, the combat has to be a real delicacy, which Slap Them All pulls off and outshines with a variety of attacks that take out the monotony of a genre whose DNA has this problem.
In terms of controls, with one button we will jump, with another we will perform the conventional attack, another will allow us to catch our two enemies, something extremely useful to spread the bad guys all over the screen, as well as some power ups that we find on the ground, and by pressing “Y” (by default) we will access a special move. A diferencia de otros juegos del género, esta técnica no se pagará con energía sino con unos rayos que están justo debajo de nuestra barra de vida, aunque para recuperar los rayos será solo necesario golpear enemigos, por lo que los golpes especiales no serán escasos the title.
The right trigger allows us to block attacks more, but either because of the awkward position (for me) of this control or because it wasn’t really necessary for me, I didn’t use it most of the time. along this scan, so I say its use is almost optional. The other of the triggers will be in a hurry, because in single player mode, it will allow us to switch between Asterix and Obelix at will, something particularly useful and necessary when one of our characters is almost powerless.
The difference between Asterix and Obelix besides the speed of each, the former being of course faster, lies in the types of blows that each gives. Keep in mind here that the game will often remind you of a Dynasty Warriors or another musou by the quantity of enemies who will come to attack us at the same time and without mercy.
The difficulty of the game is not that high even in hard mode, although varying the difficulty mode will increase the level of damage we will receive from our rivals. The energy can be recovered thanks to the input of meats which one will find breaking barrels during the phases.
At the end of each act, we will face a boss who will come to attack us with his own army of minions, but although many have overwhelming power, they are not difficult to defeat once the attack system is discovered.
Duration
A controversial point is this, and that is that if we go straight to the numbers, the game can take around 7 hours to go through the 6 acts it contains, each divided into 10 sentences each counting the intermediaries that take us away from the theme of hitting and moving forward to do other things like run a race by pressing buttons, or hunt wild boars by directing our character against them, among others. Something like this also happened in the Konami arcade which allowed us to go horse-drawn carriage races.
And getting back to the controversy I touched on at the start of the paragraph, is that while the game lasts longer than other games in the genre (than Streets of Rage 4 itself to name just one example) modern) the variety of enemies and phrases becomes rare for so many hours and for many it can be tedious in more advanced levels, especially if we take into account the repetition of the stages of the ship for example.
The game features a local cooperative multiplayer mode which makes things great fun to enjoy with a colleague, and a free mode which encourages us to exceed the scores we have on each level, which adds value to the replayability. Of course, this mode will only be available once the main mode is finished and not before.
conclusion
Mr. Nutz’s team did a great job with Asterix and Obélix Slap Them All creating a beat them great with the characters of Goscinny and Uderzo. The title at hand left me wishing for a future new opus where maybe other elements that I think are missing in this production could be incorporated, such as the possibility of buying or learning new hits, of take different paths in the same scenarios or interact more with different objects of the phases to throw things against enemies and this type of actions.
If you are looking for a beat them quality or if you are a fan of Asterix, do not hesitate a second because this game definitely deserves to be in your library.