REVIEW - Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows (2024)

The first time I played Gauntlet was Gauntlet: Legends on the N64 when I was maybe 4 years old, and I pumped hours into it with my brother. Anyone who’s played these games will tell you that there’s not much to Gauntlet games. You get an attack or two, maybe a spell that you pick up, and in Dark Legacy you get an ultimate ability that you can use every once in a while. But for the most part, you’re spamming the same attack button over and over to kill mobs & the structures that generate them, loot things and upgrade the occasional stat here and there, though there was almost no RPG system at all other than that. If you were to say that this sounds like a braindead loop, you wouldn’t objectively be that wrong, but even in that primitive state I found the series to be a blast to go through with friends, and from what I can tell many agree and love the older Gauntlet games, especially Dark Legacy - Killing mobs and looting are two things in gaming that are practically impossible to fuck up, especially when you’re doing it with friends (if you’re playing these games solo, reconsider your life). This, coupled with some cheesy in a good way type of badass visual design, cool settings and a soundtrack that could be surprisingly good at times, made the overall experience pretty great.

My point here is that I liked this series already before playing this, even when it was barebones. But in all those hours I pumped into the older Gauntlet games, I would constantly find myself wishing for more meat in the gameplay itself. While the gameplay loop itself was cool, it always felt to me like the older Gauntlet games were a huge tease mechanically. They’d give you more than one attack, but not a real moveset. They’d give you the ability to upgrade stats, but nothing else, and you couldn’t have an actual build because no matter what class you were playing or what your playstyle was, you’d basically be trolling to do anything other than upgrade strength so that your standard spammable ranged attack is stronger. It was like a woman felt me up all night and then just left, sure it was cool, but I wasn’t fully satisfied.

This seems to not be the common consensus though, because Seven Sorrows remedied these issues pretty well and everyone completely shitted on it for doing so. Seriously, if you go look up reviews for this game, almost all of them are in the 50’s and 60’s. I find this sad and kind of illogical, because this game is basically just the last game (which everyone loved) but better in ever way, for the most part.

If you played the previous Gauntlet games, the first thing you’ll notice upon playing a level or two of this entry, is that more emphasis has been placed on presentation. This game was so hated / not played that its pretty much impossible to find decent screenshots, but some of the set pieces and levels were definitely pretty to look at - nothing super crazy, but nice, definitely a step up from the previous entries. The east Asian inspired level, pirate level (with functioning ship cannons, and loot on the pirate’s ship for you to take), and a forest level that leads up to a Mayan looking structure containing the level’s boss all stuck out to me. The music is pretty good, but Legends / Dark Legacy had the better soundtrack. The boss designs were also satisfactory to me, and the level design itself from a gameplay perspective was solid. Some backtracking, but not too much and the path is always clear, but you can’t autopilot through it either.

And finally, the gameplay and combat - which is essentially the only thing that matters in this series at all. Basically everyone else I’ve ever seen talk about the game refers to it as a watered down hack and slash, which is mostly true, but it was still more than satisfactory to me. You have a LOT of options at pretty much any given time here. You have a basic attack, a block breaker, a launch / knockup, a panic button AOE explosion that sends enemies flying and eats pretty much all your mana, and then 4 class specific super attacks that all have their own dedicated button, which need to be purchased with gold. You can also unlock more traditional “Press square, square, triangle to do X” type combos seen in many other hack and slash games. To me, this system is what makes the game infinitely better than its predecessors. Finally, classes are actually classes that all feel and play differently, as opposed to just having a different ultimate or different stats. This changes the games from something where you’re more focused on the direction you’re moving than to the attacks you’re doing, to a game where you have multiple different options at any given time that may be suited to different things, making you think a bit more while still retaining the core silly but fun arcade beat em up gameplay loop in the previous games. I could easily see this being a game where you actually have to lock in and focus on harder difficulties and make sure you’re being as optimal as you can. It stops you from autopiloting, it gives you more to look forward to, it lets you experiment, and it indirectly boosts the replay value immensely as you can play the game over as another class and it will be different enough that it feels worth it. So yes, it is just a watered down hack and slash system, but it holds so much more weight here than it would in an actual full on singleplayer hack and slash, because the soul of the previous entries is still there - you get all the arcade style beat em up co-op fun of the previous games, while also solving the main problems those games had - mindless spamming, lack of a feeling of character progression, and lack of identity in its different characters.

So with surprisingly solid presentation and a combat system that isn’t innovative by any means but is (apparently only for me) pretty satisfying and drives you to keep playing, you have a nice package here of a game you can casually play on the couch with some friends, that isn’t completely mindless, but isn’t deep enough that you guys have to stop socializing to focus either. To me, the game accomplishing what it set out to do in that way and the overall experience justifies the rating that I gave the game. Sadly, there are a few glaring issues that need to be discussed. First is the games length - me and my friend beat this game on normal difficulty in one sitting, in probably around five hours. The pretty big replay potential this game offers does help that a little bit, as I could easily see myself playing this game again with my friend as a different class 1 or 2 more times, but considering that people likely paid full standard price for this game on launch, the game being 5 hours long is criminal. Second, the bosses from a gameplay perspective were not the best. They looked great, weren’t very gimmicky, weren’t too hard and weren’t too easy (except the final boss), but they were mindless. They all have respawn points INSIDE the boss arena, so most of the time all you had to do was run into the boss and spam your strongest stuff, even if you died, and then just respawn and do it again. Repeat a couple times and the boss falls. Third, some of the levels in the end (namely the underworld level and the level right before it, with the latter repeating the same exact room THREE times..) definitely lost some of the steam the game had both in terms of presentation and playability. But out of 16 levels, 2 or 3 bad levels just doesn’t mean that much to me.

To tie everything together, the game is nothing to take super serious but it’s definitely an excellent choice to sit through with your friends after a couple beers, especially if you’re tired of all the Mario Party and Mario Kart and things like that - this is a bit meatier and will probably scratch your itch better if you’ve been playing videogames for a long time. I also think this game got judged severely unfairly, going back and reading some of the reviews the main criticism is the plot… Which makes no sense, because you don’t play these games for plot, they INTENTIONALLY have almost no plot. Dark Legacy and Legends had even less of a plot, and everybody loved those games to death. It definitely doesn’t help that this game went for more of a hack and slash style, and then also happened to release the same year as Devil May Cry 3 & the original God of War - basically impossible standards for any hack and slash or even just any game in general to live up to, let alone a fun party game… But the bottom line is that it’s worth playing.