Review: Beowulf: The Game

     As I write, I’m hiding out in a basement nargile (hookah) café. I was trying to get some “real” writing done, but then the music died, and an eerie silence descended on the place. It was far too unsettling to write fiction, so I switched to this. As it turns out, it they just killed it for a few minutes for prayer (meaning it’s only a little after noon, so I’ve still got about three hours to kill before I can go home).

     As I said in my previous post, I’m reviewing the last four games I’ve played in order from worst to best. Next up is Beowulf: The Game (not to be confused with the epic poem). I’m not sure what company made it, but I believe it’s the same company that did Laxdaela Saga: The Game (it did poorly until they re-released an online version called “Ancestry.com”). It’s one of several games that I snagged at Play N’ Trade for next to nothing. At $2.50 it’s well worth it. It’s easily as satisfying as a pint of domestic beer, but not quite to the level of a micro-brew. It does, however, keep you occupied a little bit longer (even if you got bored and quit as early as I did).

     To begin with it was a pretty okay game. It’s not all that different from other third-person melee based action games (Think Dante’s Inferno or Assassin’s Creed). You push the stick in different directions to target different hostiles and mash buttons for a variety of attacks. In an attempt to be true to the poem, there is a bit of an emphasis on grappling. You can, by pressing “B” (it’s almost always “B”) grab your enemies and either kill them (generally by tapping buttons repeatedly or in a sequence), or toss them (with a poor level of accuracy) at other enemies. With enemies who have weapons, you can disarm them and steal their weapons, too (this comes in handy since any weapon you carry seems to break/vanish/get lost after a short amount of time).

     There is also a bit of climbing, but it’s generally on cliff-faces with poorly marked hand-holds, and thus mostly just annoying. In most cases, it’s to find a hidden something, or lower a bridge/open a gate for your merry band of thanes to follow you.

     Damnable Thanes. Anglo-Saxon kings may have had a use for thanes, but that isn’t the case in this game. When sailing, you have to tap buttons in a rhythm (like the banging of drums) to make your thanes row. This would be a kind of neat touch if it didn’t go on for so long. When you play a game like this, you don’t mind tapping buttons in a repetitive fashion, but something damn-well better die the majority of the time. They also seem to throw in random bits where a similar process is required to make your thanes move a big stone door out of the way. This seems pointless when (after filling up your badass meter) you’re capable of using a stone column twice your height as a club to beat Grendel senseless (before ripping him limb from limb), slaying a slew of slippery sea serpents, brutally bashing a bevy of barbarous beasts and splitting the atom with a single roundhouse kick (that last one may have actually been Chuck Norris, but you get the idea). Unless you’re trying to boost the poor bastards’ self-esteem by making them feel useful, I fail to see the point.

     That isn’t the main reason the thanes annoy me. Like every NPC ever, they’re next to useless in combat (this is why I’m confident I can put down any robot uprising). They demonstrate this fact by dying very, very quickly. This wouldn’t be so bad if some sadist at Epic Poem Game Studios hadn’t decided that you lose if you fail to keep at least one of them alive. This is especially true given that you lack any useful control over them (you can’t leave them some place safe, for example). Their primary strategy seems to primarily involve getting themselves completely surrounded and then being brutally slaughtered. On the plus side, they haven’t got automatic weapons or explosives, so you don’t have to worry about them killing you or one another (like Ian in Fallout with his stupid SMG).

     So, it’s a great game for the price, but overall, rather meh. I’d write more about it, but I actually haven’t actually played it since then. I also must take this time to apologize for not posting this earlier. I wrote it about a week ago, and then promptly forgot that I never actually posted it. Sorry about that.