While I have been a bit unfair to arcade ports for lacking in content, Gauntlet Legends is an arcade game that makes a lot of sense for a home console port. The arcade game used a password system to play the game across many sessions, so replacing this with a memory card save worked extremely well.

Gauntlet Legends is a simple hack and slash game where you fight though hordes of enemies, locating their spawner and destroying that. It doesn’t do anything unique for this genre, but it keeps things simple to make it a ton of fun in multiplayer.

Gauntlet Legends is very much designed with four people in mind, each being a different class (each class also has multiple options) so that you can unleash a variety of attacks. With others, you also have to decide between who gets treasure and who gets health, or potentially end up squabbling amongst yourselves, each levelling up separately. The game is a lot more dynamic like this, and is something that’s an immense amount of fun.

Play on your own, however, and the game’s flaws are very clear. The game is immensely repetitive. You fight through enemies destroying their spawn points, then blast every wall and hunt for every switch to find the hidden objects you need to progress.

Because Gauntlet Legends doesn’t adapt for different numbers of players, there are an immense amount of enemies. A lot of the time, the only valid tactic is to shoot them as they form a single line until they give up (they stop spawning after a while), sometimes using your special attack to move forwards a bit.

The N64 version of the game skips two worlds in the arcade game, but adds two in their place. The later PlayStation version had the N64 levels and all the original levels, but only supported two players.

Gauntlet Legends is a really fun game, but does require four people to be in the right frame of mind to play it.

Fun

Formulating strategies, slaughtering beasts, destroying the monster-spawning generators – doing your best to keep each other alive. It’s simple and nostalgic, but great fun all the same. The single player game, though, is a lonely and repetitive experience.

Jes Bickham, N64 Magazine #36. Review Score: 81%

Remake or remaster?

A Gauntlet collection would be great. Especially if, for this game, they can combine the best features of each version.

Official ways to get the game.

There is no official way to get Gauntlet Legends