REAL GAMES - ASTERIX

Oh joy!  Another game based on a French comic that I have never heard of!  I love these.

Asterix is another platforming game based on the very popular French comic, The Adventures of Asterix.  Again, I have never even heard of this character before, but apparently he is HUGE in Europe.  Like Tintin, Asterix has numerous movies based on it, some animated and some live action, and of course they both have their own games...but Asterix takes it a step further by having its own AMUSEMENT PARK.  Yeah.  That's awesome.

Why can't we have anything this cool?  We get Six Flags and Disneyland.  The French get an amusement park based around the Roman invasions.

The intro to this game is a very vague text drop explaining what is going on.  Apparently, somebody named Obelix has been kidnapped by Julius Caeser.  Despite it not telling me much (or anything) about the story, it does have me intrigued.

The controls for this game are pretty simple.  Jump, run, and a weird punch that serves as your only attack.  The shoulder buttons are the important part here though, as they control the camera view.  Without these, you will fall to your death a lot, so you better learn to use them.

Audio is repetitive and annoying.  There is maybe four songs total for the entire game, and they don't really offer anything worth listening to.  Listen to the first Act's music to get a taste and then hit the mute button.

The graphics are so-so.  The sprites seem to stick with the source material pretty close, at least the little bit that I could find while doing my research.  The backgrounds, however, are not so good.  Some stages look like they colored in some random shapes and called it good.  Kind of disappointing.

I've said it once, and I'll say it again.  The French are fucking weird.

The gameplay is fun, but short.  Once you learn the camera controls and the hit detection range for your awkward punch attack, this game becomes a breeze.  I beat it on the hardest difficulty in just under an hour.  It angers me when writing a review for a game takes me longer than playing the damn thing.

Overall, the game just feels like wasted time, regardless of how little time was actually spent on it.  Asterix scores 2 Panaceas out of 5.  I can only hope that the next game, Asterix and Obelix, will offer me more than a mere hour of gameplay.