Is it just me or has there been a bigger rush of bringing back older games into the HD era? The Atari game Warlords is the next game to get a fancy makeover for current gen consoles, but sometimes these games are better left on the shelf.
Warlords
Developer: Griptonite Games
Price: $10
Platform: PS3 (reviewed) & Xbox 360
A PSN copy of Warlords was supplied to us
The game does have a story mode, but it’s basically just the basic game with a quick paragraph of text you can read before starting a level. The story isn’t very interesting and the campaign feels thrown in because you don’t get much out of it that you couldn’t already do in an online game or solo quick-match. Speaking of multiplayer, you’ll be able to play against up to four players locally or online. Honestly though, I really wouldn’t recommend playing the quick-match mode against CPU opponents because their reaction time is complete bullshit. They will instantly take priority with blocking your attacks and if you bother to charge a shot all of them will stop what they’re doing and move their shields to block your shot. Now that I think about it, the online lobbies are empty so I guess CPU or local players are going to have to be your only option.
So the point of the game is that you’re a warlord who has to protect his castle from the fireballs that a dragon just decides to toss into the arena every so often. Of course, instead of rising up against this evil dragon, the four warlords decide to pelt the fireballs at each other. You do this by sliding a magical shield that will deflect the fireball pong style. The goal is to smash your opponent’s walls with fireballs so that they eventually crumble, leaving the opposing warlord exposed to a finishing blow with a fireball. Besides bouncing fireballs (there can be up to five at a time) you can also catch them in your shield and hold them to charge. Charging fireballs makes them faster and stronger when released at the cost of greatly damaging your wall when you let it go. There are four different warlords you can pick from but I didn’t see any difference between their charged shots besides a cosmetic change. I’d didn’t quite like the way the paddle controls though, it was just way too finicky to control and there’s no sensitivity option to change either. It also doesn’t help that the frame-rate has some issues as well.
So you have an endless supply of these little minions called snoots. You’ll only get a few out at a time and will slowly replenish whenever you lose one. These guys are in charge of healing your fort, attacking enemy forts, and capturing control points. You can manually control them with the right right to move them into position for what you want to do or you can use the directional pad to quickly send them someplace while you focus on more important matters. You have a rally snoot who will never die and wherever he goes is where all your snoots will run to. The problem with snoots though is that they’re incredibly fragile and any snoots that cross paths with enemy snoots with see casualties on both sides.
To collect the various power-ups in the game you’ll need to move your snoots onto the points where they’ll sacrifice themselves to fill up the bar. The tricky thing is that an enemy player can move their snoots onto the point too and their sacrificed snoots will also fill up the control point which means you’ll have to sit there and hope your snoot was the last one to fill in the point to win the power-up. Besides that you’ll also have to deal with the black knight and his own crew of snoots showing up to wreck shit. He’ll stomp over to one of the forts and just start whacking it until it decides to move on or if another player angers it by hitting it with a fireball. When he appears a white shield will appear and give invulnerability to all your snoots while the black knight is on the field which makes rushing for it key. With all of these things in play it really doesn’t help when the frame rate starts to chug a bit.
Controlling your snoots can get pretty problematic with how chaotic everything gets. Not only do you need to keep track of multiple fireballs, effects exploding all over the place, the black knight, but also where your snoots are and if they’re about to kill themselves by colliding into any enemy snoots; it really doesn’t help when the camera is positioned so far off from them so they appear super tiny. The directional buttons help direct them a bit, but it won’t help you locate them in a cluster of busy colors. Many times I’d lose my snoots and find out they somehow walked all the way into the corner of a fort. The 1v1 maps are a little easier on the eyes since the camera is placed a bit closer and there’s not as much stuff going on to distract you.
The Final Word
Sometimes a remake of a classic game works out great and other times it’s just not very interesting which is sadly the case with Warlords. It’s just not interesting enough to make a big splash and it’s lacking in features. Fans of the original game might want to drop the $10 on it, but they’d probably get the same enjoyment if they played the original.
– MonsterVine Rating: 2.5 out of 5 – Mediocre
