I remember first seeing the boxart for this game on Lik-Sang or some other import site not long after it came out, and being amazed that there was a new Gold Axe game, and frustrated that not only was no-one talking about it, but there were no signs of it ever getting released in Europe. It did get that Europe release a few years later though, as part of the SEGA Classics Collection that compiled a bunch of the SEGA Ages 2500 Series games onto a single disc. Everybody hated it!
I tolerated it at the time, partly from nostalgia, and partly from the beat em up drought that had been ongoing for about a decade at that point. Playing it again now, a decade and a half later (meaning it's now older than the original Golden Axe was when it was first released!), my opinion's a little more reasonable, and though it's not the irredeemible garbage people made it out to be when the Classics Collection came out, it's not particularly great, either.
It looks okay for a nineteen year old budget game, though there are some massive weak points, like how most of the magic attacks other than Tyris' dragon summon look pathetic, and how Gilius looks like a bendy rubber action figure that's been played with too much, giving him weird bow legs and arms constantly stretched outwards. The few cutscenes look pretty nice, though, thanks to the developers went the route of using low polygon count models and covering that up with higher resolution textures. So the characters actually look better in close up than they do while you're actully playing the game.
As for how the game plays, it's a mixed bag that's mostly bad. There's some stuff I do like, such as the magic potion system being replaced by a meter that fills up as you attack enemies, so you get to use your magic more often. The little elves (who now look like little kobold creatures) are still present, with the potions giving a large amount of meter in one go. A nice little touch is that if you make them drop a potion, then leave it on the ground for a while, they'll pick it back up!
As for the bad, there's quite a few things. Gilius is so slow as to be pretty much useless to play as. The same can also be said of the back attack that every character has, though the normal attacks have such weird hitboxes that you'll usually hit enemes that are behind you if they're stood closely enough anyway. There's very few enemy types, and a lot of stages don't even have bosses at the end of them! An upside of the scant variety in enemies is that you can learn their behaviours pretty easily, I guess? The main thing to remember is that every enemy, if they're at the other end of the screen from you, will do a running attack. So try not to be stuck mid-combo when that happens.
There's really no reason to play this version of Golden Axe in this day and age. The arcade original is better, and the Mega Drive port of that is pretty good too, making up for its slightly worse graphics with a couple of extra stages. Hopefully SEGA will let someone give Golden Axe the Streets of Rage 4 treatment, and we'll get an all-new, excellent game that also looks amazing. Or at the very least, I hope Revenge of Death Adder gets a home port someday. One final thing I'll say about SEGA Ages Golden Axe, though: it's a lot better than the absolute garbage that was Golden Axe: Beast Rider.
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