For most people, their experience with arcade classic Gauntlet can be summed up in four succinct words - "Wizard needs food. Badly!" Originally released in 1985, the coin-op machine is one of the most revered games around, as it was so revolutionary at the time. As one of the first machines to feature four player co-op dungeon crawling, and some fancy digitized sound effects (the machine actually spoke the aforementioned "wizard needs food" clip at you, which was something revolutionary at the time), it was a game perhaps best known for its difficulty. Partially designed to drain coins from you, and partially intended to force you to work together, it was a game that encouraged teamwork, as you and your friends fought together for survival against the encroaching hordes. And while the difficulty may have been toned down for the upcoming PC reboot, working together with your team is every bit as important as ever.
Dragging the co-op dungeon crawler kicking and screaming into the present day, and reinventing it for an audience that may well never have heard of the original, Gauntlet (that's its full name - for maximum confusion, it doesn't seem to be sporting a subtitle) is more than a fresh lick of paint. Taking the ever reliable adventuring formula of bringing four friends together, giving them a dungeon full of baddies and loot to explore, while staying true to the original's roots, this is every bit as much fun to play as you'd expect.
As is often the way with these sort of games, the first decision you'll make is also the most important one, as you get to choose your character class. While on the original arcade version, differences between the characters were mostly cosmetic, here it's a different story. Given the choice between the melee strength of the Warrior or Valkyrie, or the ranged combat efficiency of the Wizard or the Elf, you'll have to choose a character to suit your play style - and there can only be one of each on your team. That'll be the first argument, then.
Delving into the world, much you see is around you is as Gauntlet has always been - in the gloomy, dust filled, torch lit bowels of an unnamed tomb, there's hordes of risen mummies staggering towards you needing to be slayed; treasure waiting to be collected; and the famous food to be consumed.
Watching each other's backs
And as always, working together as a tightly knit team is the single most important thing for you to do. Even without saying anything, you'll find you quickly strike up an unspoken rapport with your players, falling into a loose formation of sorts as you make your way through the dungeon - the ranged characters standing at the back taking potshots at the baddies, and the melee characters upfront, slashing as the hordes approach, before rapidly back-pedalling when any enemy gets too close to your ranged attackers. With each character complimenting the other, even when playing with people you've never met, you'll soon be firing on all cylinders as a well oiled team - at least, to begin with.
Before too long, though, things may start to come unstuck, as your teamwork starts to fall to pieces. While it's been designed to encourage you to work together, Gauntlet's also been designed to cause you problems if you're not incredibly careful. It might be that your friend gets bored of shooting enemies and decides to go looting treasure instead while the rest of you stare down the army of undead; it could be that a stray fireball blows up the turkey you were just about to chow down on - or, worst of all, the guy with full health goes and nicks the nearest turkey to replenish his barely-even-scratched body while you're verging on being dead. Well, at least he has turkey.
Still, forcing you to maintain a constant conversation with your team mates is a large part of what makes Gauntlet Gauntlet, as along with deciding on your turkey allocation - and calling for support when things go pear shaped - the game also has plenty of options it'll throw your way. With a limited number of keys on offer in each level - which in the land of Gauntlet can be used to unlock walls, not doors - you'll have to decide as a team where and when to use them, while being careful to avoid brushing against a wall accidentally and automatically bringing the wall crashing down. In a narrow corridor, when under fire by countless enemies, that can be trickier than it looks - but here, that's part of the fun. Still, there's a fine line to tread between sticking true to the original and reinventing the game for today's audiences
"Some of the things don't translate all that well from the original. Because it was an arcade machine, it revolved around putting in quarters to keep your health topped up, as it was constantly ticking down, and you had to put more money in to stay alive." Said Rob Tatnell, Art Director at Arrowhead Games "That didn't fit in too well with what we know nowadays. But in a weird way, a lot of stuff from the original is really really good and hold up really well. The walls is a good example - you'll have level where it's just wall after wall after wall, and there's tonnes of enemies behind them - and so you'll be trying to fight them off, but if you get a little bit too close to the next door, you'll open it."
Sounds fun.
These random panels let you leap from one part of the level to another, causing the team to be split up.
Perhaps equally chaos-inducing is the game's friendly fire, which, while it (currently) doesn't cause damage, can throw you around like a dog toy. Get hit by the wizard's poorly aimed fireball (which happened more times than we'd like to admit), and your character will be tossed across the room, away from the baddies you were facing - or, sometimes, if you're particularly lucky, towards some much needed food. Making it more of an minor annoyance than a massive frustration - the team at Arrowhead are actually speculating about making it more harsh.
"A lot of that fun, kind of social interaction that you get with other players comes from being griefed by someone else. At Arrowhead, we've always had this thing that friendly fire is always on, from the start. So when we started Gauntlet, we did the same - but one of the biggest problems was that, as you noticed with our non-damage version of friendly fire, you have melee characters in the middle of combat, and ranged characters standing at the back - and it got really, really annoying really fast! You found you were dying more from your friends shots than you were from the monsters just by playing normally - so now it's more about maybe being knocked back, rather than being damaged."
One of the less welcome changes is the new level of violence. With enemies that can be cut in half, and spurts of blood regularly splattering the floors, this is one modern trend Gauntlet could have done without.
With plenty of co-op dungeon crawling fun, Gauntlet was a lot of fun to play. Polished, even though the game's still in development, with players able to naturally find their place in the team as soon as they pick up a controller, it's a game with a heavy emphasis on teamwork - but it's also, somewhat unusually, a PC exclusive - something that seems a brave/crazy decision to take with a game that has such a heavy emphasis on four player local co-op. Though the game does support online play, it's the local co-op that's where the game truly shines, if only for the banter between friends. So why was the choice made to go PC only?
"At Arrowhead, we're really experienced with PC and it's what we've done in the past. With our other project, Helldivers, that's branching onto the Sony problems, so we'll see how that works. That said, we'll also be on Steam, and Steambox, so that's where we're hoping the kind of "box in front of the TV" multiplayer will come from"
That's all well and good, of course, but you'd be hard pushed to fit four people around a single PC at Everybody Plays towers. It's a game that seems to naturally lend itself to the friends-on-a-sofa format (which, incidentally, is exactly how it was demoed), and that would mean for most people it'd work best on a console. So is there any chance of a console port? "Yeah, I think that's something that maybe we'll look at and see what happens. There's so many factors involved."
With all the local co-op adventuring fun of the original, upgraded by its leap into the present day, if you're a fan of foraging for food or treasure hunts in forbidden dungeons with friends, this is one to keep an eye on. But forget about needing food - this is a game that needs a console port. Badly.
