You are full of bombs and/or keys.

When I was a great deal younger and significantly less cynical, I used to while away many an hour at my friend Carl’s house, playing various brightly-coloured, low-resolution offerings on his monolith of a computer — an Amstrad CPC464, a behemoth of hardware compared to my own, with a massive 64Kb RAM and a beast of a 4MHz processor. While there were a number of games available on both cassette and the ill-fated, atrociously-designed 3″ floppy disks, one of the firm favourites at the time was Gauntlet II, a game that can only be described as a mash-up between dungeon crawler, top-view shoot-’em-up, and maze. Of the four characters available — Warrior, Valkyrie, Wizard, and Elf — I always used to favour the brutish warrior (to which I tended to apply the esoteric green colour scheme), while Carl would usually opt for the blue wizard.

Thus began our adventures through the maze-like dungeons of Gauntlet, a game which — originally designed for the arcade, though successfully ported to many home computers and consoles — literally lasted forever, the dungeons cycling around and rotating or flipping themselves to provide the illusion of many more. As well as the legions of bloodthirsty monsters and the sadistic whims of your fellow adventurer, the sands of time were constantly ticking away in the form of an ever-depleting health bar. This was not a game that one could “beat”, but rather a challenge to reach the furthest point, the deepest dungeon. Rumours circulated about a “Super Sorcerer” in the form of a fire-breathing red dragon on level 100, but neither of us ever managed to get that far.

In the years following, I’ve played many of the ports, re-makes, and sequels to the venerable Gauntlet, yet none have truly managed to capture the charm and personality of the original and its masterful sequel. Gauntlet IV for the Sega Megadrive (Genesis, to those in Americaland) was one of the many, and while it may have fascinated me as a kid with its proto-equipment system and distinct objectives in the form of the Quest Mode, sadly this is another attempt which tried to recreate the magic and simply missed the mark.

While there are a few game modes available, including Arcade Mode, a recreation of the original “infinite dungeons” style — now playable with up to four, rather than the original limitation of an adventuring duo — the centerpiece here is the “storyline” driven Quest Mode, where the player must conquer the four dragons hidden deep in four themed towers — fire, earth, air, and water, tediously enough — before tackling the castle in order to retrieve some ancient treasure.

Gameplay is exactly what one would expect of a Gauntlet game — legions of seemingly endless foes, ranging from the thuggish Grunts to the devious Lobbers, and the ever-feared yet unimaginatively-named Deaths. Aside from gaining experience to increase one’s stats and using treasure to purchase improved equipment, there’s also the standard plethora of items lining the floors — potion-shaped “bombs” and keys, primarily, though amulets that provide limited invisibility and a few other items also make an appearance. It’s a fairly typical affair, involving slashing or shooting your way through the throng, finding hidden “trap tiles” that unlock various parts of the maze, struggling with the headache that the teleporters are bound to induce, and generally trying to find your way to the end of the dungeon in order to dispatch the hapless dragon stationed therein.

Unfortunately, Gauntlet’s original strength — its charming, unassuming gameplay — now becomes its greatest weakness. No longer faced with a “play until you die” scenario, the player is now given solid goals and objectives, but given the nature of the dungeons, which tend to require the majority of the enemies to be cleared before all the puzzle elements can be solved, it now becomes tedium, slogging through yet more wizards, yet more ghosts, yet more demons as you try to reach the next level, only to discover that you took the wrong exit (or missed a hidden switch) and have to backtrack yet again. The ambition of Gauntlet IV is its own Achilles’ heel, as the formula that worked so well for an arcade-style slasher/shooter translates poorly to a more RPG-like format.

I wish I could say I loved this game, and perhaps at first I did — its catchy, well-themed music and familiar, retro gameplay certainly struck a chord with me to begin with, but eventually it descends into a tiresome slog of distinct sameness. Perhaps it may be more enjoyable to play in the Arcade Mode with a friend or two, but given that the crux of Gauntlet IV revolves around its Quest Mode, I’m afraid I can’t recommend this version — not when there are so many other, better Gauntlet ports available on other systems.

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