Asterix – De Romeinse Lusthof – Review
The adventures of Asterix are widely known in Belgium and France and thus “Asterix – De Romeinse Lusthof” only saw a limited release in certain countries. To celebrate the new comic book, a movie and a game were released as well and thanks to that we had the chance to look at the 3DS game. Sadly, this Asterix game does not bring back the fond memories the old games have brought us. Prepare to get frustrated, bored and simply annoyed by the lack of inspiration that went into this game.
Story
Asterix, Obelix and many of the other Gauls are the last pockets of resistance that the Romans simply cannot overcome. After many defeats against the lively bunch of makeshift warriors the Romans decide to build the ‘Lusthof’ around the city of the Gauls, hoping their giant Roman city will finally scare off Asterix and the other Gauls.
As expected Asterix and Obelix are not impressed and they decide to take out the Romans, who are trying to deforest the lands surrounding the village of the Gauls. Sadly it’s not that simple as just punching some Romans into the orbit, where Team Rocket already is one of the most popular residents. As expected, the pesky Romans have no clue on how to handle de deforesting themselves and thus they use slaves in order to achieve their goals. Seeing the Romans promised the slaves they will be freed when they complete deforesting the zone around the village, the Gauls will have to come up with another plan in order to help the slaves as well.
Overall the story is brought to you in an extremely simple way, with only a few small portions of text, thus making it a lot less appealing than it could have been. The static behaviour of the characters and the overall unappealing dialogues make for one really boring plot, which does not really succeed in capturing your attention throughout the campaign that only lasts around three hours.
Graphics
Whilst the 3DS may not be the most powerful machine on the market, ‘Asterix – De Romeinse Lusthof’ proves to be extremely underwhelming. Even the charismatic characters are portrayed in such a fashion that they simply look unappealing and dated in so many ways.
For some reason all of the characters lack a mouth and as far as my knowledge of the olden days goes, people supposedly had mouths. During dialogues the characters simply wiggle a little and that’s pretty much all of the emotions you will see during your playthrough.
During the actual gameplay moments, things sadly don’t get any better. Obelix’ animations are pretty much atrocious and unnatural. For some reason Obelix captures wild boars by clapping and turning them in to what seems like a fart cloud and his other attack animations will surely make you raise an eyebrow. When Obelix attacks, it seems as if he is flipping off another driver that just cut him off or that he is saluting an angry dictator that also shared the Gaul’s love of moustaches, be it a poorly trimmed one.
The village and the areas you will be strolling through again aren’t that much better. You will be running around on static backgrounds, in which you can hardly interact with the few objects that are copy pasted upon them. The village has a few houses, which look almost exactly the same, with invisible walls surrounding them. Even your own house has the same invisible wall around it, making it a lot less personal than it could have been.
Last but not least, most of the images on the touch screen are quite poorly done, seeing they either show what you have to do with the stylus or show a poorly done background for the most part. But even worse are the animations when you have to do the ‘cooking pot’ mini-game. The graphics of the background and the ingredients you have to drag in the pot itself are on par with the graphical prowess of the Atari 2600 which was released in 1979.
Sound
When it comes to the overall musical quality of the game, ‘Asterix – De Romeinse Lusthof’ offers yet again a below average performance. You’ll be treated to music, that might do fine as tunes for a menu screen but nothing more as that. You’ll hear the same five notes over and over again, seeing the tracks often don’t even feel like complete songs.
Speech, except for ghastly screams when punching or scaring Romans away, is not implemented in the game. You’ll notice that Asterix and his friends just make annoying noises instead of actual spoken dialogue. A very annoying feature that destroys the little charisma that was left to be saved.
Gameplay
Whilst the story, simple as it may be, should still be a decent premises for a fun, action adventure game the developers opted to go for a series of small mini-games instead. Whilst this could be a fun twist of events, the mini-games end up being quite tedious, too long at time and simply irrelevant with the overall story.
In between the small story portions of the game you will be able to run around the town, which is very limited, in order to talk to the village chief in order to start your missions. These missions are, as stated before, mini-games. These said mini-games are quite simplistic and are quite repetitive throughout the game. You will be spending time chasing and hunting wild boars, punching Romans in the sky, playing whack-a-mole with Romans as well as boars, catching fish with a barrel, breaking barrels, finding treasures, play fetch, play ‘Bard Hero’, planting trees and a few more.
Whilst this may seem that there are a ton of things to do, you might be correct that there are a few things to do but sadly, these are atrocious. You’ll soon notice that everything moves too slow, making the game quite dull. Outside of that, the controls are extremely lacking and irresponsive, making the already sluggish gameplay even worse.
Most games consist out of running around and pressing the A button in order to punch, scare or capture your enemies, whilst on the other hand you will have games that rely on performing actions with the touch screen. Whilst it is fun to see a game trying to use the touch screen functions for actual gameplay purposes, they more than often don’t work as they should. You will often be presented with certain patterns you have to recreate in order to perform the desired action. Sadly, wiggling around randomly with the stylus on screen often delivers better results than trying to be accurate. Other than that, the game wants you to tap the touch screen in order to progress through dialogues but once again it either proves to be irresponsive or the game wants you to press on a small, unknown, specific spot in order to progress.
For those who happen to be fans of certain mini-games will notice that as you progress through the game, more villagers appear and they will offer you the chance to play these games again. This is actually nearly the same as choosing Arcade mode in the home menu.
Conclusion
‘Asterix – De Romeinse Lusthof’ is one of those games that make one long for the olden days, namely the old generation of Asterix games. Whilst the developers tried to add a few fun mini-games to the equation, the gameplay turned out to be sluggish, irresponsive and overall bland and boring. Graphically the iconic characters from the adventures of Asterix were stripped down in order to present you with a shell of their glamorous selves. Sadly, what could have been a fun and amusing trip down memory lane proved to be a game that seems to have been released solely for the purpose of promoting the new feature film with the same name. Perhaps children might find certain features of the game entertaining but it’s doubtful they will stay interested for a long time.
Asterix - De Romeinse Lusthof - Review,
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