They thought that they had a technologically sound team with a lot of vision and forward thinking in Secret Level.” They wanted to see if a western development team could achieve that similar success. “The heads of Sega at the time were very interested in trying to tap into the success of ‘Grand Theft Auto’ in western markets. “The real heart of the game originally, if you consider games like ‘Conan Exiles’ today and even ‘Rage,’ those kinds of games, those pseudo open worlds aspects of those, was really at the heart and scope of the game that was originally pitched to Sega,” says producer Michael Boccieri to Variety. The focus would turn to rideable beasts, with heroes scouring the land, solving puzzles, and fighting Death Adder’s minions while on the hunt for a mythical Golden Axe. The pitch was for an open world fantasy adventure. … We were looking for something everyone could get behind, a real change in direction in terms of creativity.” “We spent a fair amount of time and money, more than we previously had on other pitches. “We ended up going all out on pitch materials,” says Christopher Bretz, one of the principals at Secret Level. Not discouraged and seeking to showcase their creative side, Secret Level pushed to take on the “Beast Rider” project. Prior to “ Golden Axe: Beast Rider,” Secret Level attempted to port “America’s Army” from Xbox to PlayStation 2 for publisher Ubisoft but struggled. Their specialty wasn’t creating, rather getting games up and running on different platforms. Their resume showed no major projects, just technology. This is way less exciting, and more annoying, than it looks.For Secret Level, traditionally a 20 to 30 employee studio focused on porting games like “Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter,” this was new. Why you go from place-to-place and why you don't just teleport to the ending is somewhat beyond me, though it's probably explained somewhere in the nonsensical storyline that lost me about 30 seconds into the experience. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to the storyline, and the way the game changes scenery on you is that it forces you to teleport to another section of the world. The environments that you'll fight in are pretty damn boring. Oh, and having to throw the Golden Axe at beacons and statues (with an extremely clunky aiming system) while you're being attacked isn't fun either. It's also not fun to get hit when you're down, but that happens too. I'm not sure how they didn't figure this one out before, but I'm pretty sure everyone else in the industry knows that getting shot in the back is not fun. Some of them will fire at you from off-screen, and oftentimes you'll have guys firing at you from both sides of an area. Only a few enemies will be on-screen at any one time, but more will continuously respawn as you kill others. But the poor parry system isn't the only reason. Even just getting through the tutorial section that requires you to do this a number of times shows how frustrating it'll be later on. The result is that you have to perfectly time when you press the parry button to match the forthcoming hit of your opponent, but not too early and not too late. This might be OK (but sluggish) if she stayed in the blocking pose, but she doesn't and instead immediately drops her sword again. Rather than immediately snapping to the parry so that it instantly works, Tyris goes into an animation to parry, which results in a delay. The parry, on the other hand, is terrible. The dodge works as expected - as soon as you hit the button, you're out of the way and able to unleash a counter.Ĭlick here to watch the Mirigore. When the enemy's attack glows orange, you have to dodge, and when it's blue, you're supposed to parry it. On one shoulder button you have dodge, and on the other you have parry. While that's just boring, the defensive maneuvers at your disposal are excruciatingly annoying. Aside from the upper-cut slash or kicking options, they all do pretty much the same thing. Slashing away at your two main attack buttons results in very few combo options, and there's not a whole lot of variance here. Your move set is very basic and doesn't have anything close to the depth of options that you'll find in franchises like God of War or Devil May Cry, or even far lesser titles for that matter. Where do I start? Firstly, the combat is terrible.
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