Because i’m slowly turning April into the “Asterix & Obelix” month, and due to a new CGI animated film, Asterix & Obelix: The Kingdom Of Nubia, releasing this October, we’re doing more of the Microids published Asterix titles.
Since we did all the titles in the XXL subseries of Asterix & Obelix games, we’re now tackling a retro styled 2D beat em up, the fittingly titled Asterix & Obelix: Slap Them All!
The story is based on 5 classic Asterix & Obelix stories, plus an original final act, so if you were hoping for an original story, you aren’t getting that here, but the picks are indeed some of the more recognizable and beloved stories from the comic book series, like Asterix and The Normans, Asterix In Spain and Asterix & Cleopatra.
The game is fuckin gorgeous, to the point i believe they blew their entire budget on the hand-drawn style graphics, as the cutscenes are just cheap character sprites/portraits talking at each other while the portraits just fade in an out, and while the art style it’s loyal to the comic strips, it means there also some sadly fitting “ethnic stereotypes” brought over as is from the decade olds comics, like the poor black guy that is the sightseeing dude on the pirate ship and is routinely knocked over when Asterix & Obelix casually terrorize them when traveling, or the random “asian pirate with nunchuks” mid-tier enemies that might as well have “Mickey Rooney doing yellowface” masks on.
Speaking of the cutscenes, at least they voiced these, can’t say the same for Asterix & Obelix XXXL: The Ram From Hibernia… but in similar fashion to that they cheaped out and didn’t bother to dub it in italian as well, despite the franchise being really popular here still.
Gameplay wise, it’s a very simple retrostyle 2D beat em up, don’t go look for a move list in the pause menu, there ain’t any, the tutorial “hidden” in the Extras menù will make it clear there’s simply no need for one, or that there is very little to explain.
There is a quick attack you can mash to make a three hit combo, a strong attack, a jump, it’s so old school to a fault, with some concessions like the ability to block and a very simple stamina/energy management, as in even the charge-dash to run over enemies costs some energy, and you’ll have to be wary of long range javelin throwers most than anything.
There are special moves being done with directional inputs plus the special/strong attack, but needing to be still to either launch enemies skyward or do a ground smash will lead you to accidentally do the other kinds of special attacks you didn’t mean to, as in,
There are some small differences to Asterix and Obelix movesets, as in Asterix has a specific round-twist-tornado attack that he can also start/do mid-jump and automatically whips around grabbed enemies like a whip, while obelix has a string of neutral special attack, and can hold enemies without autolaunching/flailing them around.
Besides the input for the moves that could have been less finnicky or just have been their own button, gameplay is decent, if very mindless and a bit too old school, with almost zero enviromental interactions, no weapons, just some score or health pick ups to be found in barrels and some obstacles, and very few enemy types.
they even do the “variety stages” in old school fashion, as in, in one you are auto-running and have to attack as many romans and boars as you can while the level autoscrolls, one has romans on chariots running over you, or a race that’s just button mashing to make your character move faster then the other player (or the IA), making this feel like a SNES game, honestly, if it wasn’t for the balancing done via the energy system that helps in you abusing the mechanics too much.
occasionaly there is some very little leeway to “explore”, but it’s very rare, it’ just the classic beating guys and then prooceeding on when the games tells you can “go!” on.
at least the various levels/missions every act is subdivided in doesn’t go on overly long, its the right lenght a piece, and at Normal difficulty it’s not supercheap or gratitously frustrating for its own sake… until the designers decide to make it clear that they REALLY prefer you’d play this co-op.
to be honest halfway through i kinda felt done already, even more as the game stars to randomly stretch the stages and having “harder” boss fights with no checkpoints, which would be fine if the stages were kept short as before… and subtly asking the player why the hell he is not playing this coop, i did get that feel when playing by myself,
it’s that kind of game that ramps up the difficulty with spikes and throwing more enemies on screen, deliberately so that in single player you’re gonna feel overwhelmed, just to let you know you’re supposed to be playing in co-op “like a normal person”, instead of being a lonely freak, but speaking of that, it’s disappointing why this is just 2 players co-op instead of 4, the series has plenty of characters that can be viable fighters besides the main duo, heck, even the old coot in the Gaul village would be able, so don’t try to pull the “we can’t because it against’ the spirit of the series” bullshit
i mean the game just scales the view back to accommodate for when bigger hordes of enemies are on screen, so there’s no excuse. Especially since Asterix and Obelix don’t have really properly distinct playstiles, so they could have taken a couple of the village regulars and made them playable just for 4 players, maybe it would have been messy, but not much more to break the gameplay, given what that ultimately is here, as in, really, really basic to a fault.
Yes, Asterix and Obelix play slightly different, Obelix is penalized because Asterix grab immediatly starts swinging like a flail the grabbed enemy, and is SO much better in crowd control, sure, Obelix is slightly stronger and has its own specific specials and a different combo string, but especially in single player there’s no real benefit in using him, outside of swapping tho and from since each character has its own distinct life bar, especially in late game as the game ups the enemy numbers and hordes noticeably increase.
It’s not bad, it’s clearly made by people that know how a game like this should feel and it’s satisfying to slap and sock dem Romans, vikings, random bandits, it just feels rushed, like they had the gameplay basics done and finished but couldn’t add any more mechanics or depth or moves because Microids wanted this out sooner than anticipated or something along those lines; like you expect to be there an “Ultimate” move of sorts for the tough spots, but nope, not even that.
… and why the fuck would anyone rush an Asterix game? It’s an evergreen franchise, for fuck’s sake.
Regardless, eventually the repetition becomes a problem even if you like these old fashioned sidescrolling beat em ups, because even back in the day these had more complexity or better enemy variety, or kept things on the shorter side, even when they weren’t ported from the arcades.
well, it’s not that the levels are stretched out per sé more than expected (at least for a good chunk of the game), is that the game recycles so many locales, backgrounds over and over, and even new one often use similar assets, so it all become kind of a mush, especially as the enemy variety is bad and doesn’t really improve, for example i fought the pirate ship captain, Redbeard, like 6 times at least during the campaign.
to say nothing of how the ship asset gets recycled also as a roman galeon after being the ol’ pirate ship, and honestly after the midpoint it becomes a struggle, especially in single player, as the game resorts to suddendly unleash 2 roman centurion bosses at the same time, while also doling out health pickups slightly less before the boss
if you’re lucky after the seemingly endless hordes of roman or copypasted enemies in their various recolored variants MAYBE you’ll get to face a new boss type foe, maybe.
the final stage obviously has you fight basically a boss rush of previous boss types Roman enemies, so in a way i was glad i accidentally lowered the difficulty to easy, since i was already more than ready to just fuckin finish the game and shelv it forever, so while i didn’t intend to do that (since i did want to get the trophy for beating it at the normal on my first go, didn’t want or planned to replay it ever since it’s loo long and drawn out of a campaign)
you see, you can start a file on a difficulty and if you find it too hard you have an option to reduce the difficulty…. but you can’t raise it back if you want. I hoped that i would be able, not thinking that maybe i couldn’t since i didn’t think it would affect the trophies unlocking, hence after doing the entire game on the standard difficulty, i did the final chapter on Easy.
Which i couldn’t do anything about it anymore, but i choked up as a “little happy accident” Bob Ross style, since the enemies are less of a sponge on Easy, their numbers are not affected in numbers, at all, it’s still can be pretty cheap, so it just saved me some time and made finishing the game quicker than expected, which i gladly accepted, and i guess was subconsciounsly wishing for.
most people won’t even bother to finish it, definitely not in single player, and they’re right, why bother when the enemies have so little variety and are often recycled without even giving them a brief contextual explanation, so you end up fighting the same romans in the final chapter as you did in the first chapter.
These elongated levels stand in stark contrast to levels that are basically 1 minute long bonus stages (some still somehow feeling longer than they should) and should be treated as such, but are instead incorporated into the campaign because it’s not like theres something else to play, there’s no mini-games, extra challenge stages, nada.
Yes, you pick up coins and items from the crates and as a loot left by fallen enemies, but that doesn’t serve as a currency to unlock gallery extras or to buy extra moves, these just count towards the stage overall score, like we’re fuckin back in the Atari days.
The campaign itself it’s quite sizeable for a game like this, it’s like 7 hours, but only because the game repeats itself over and over, and as previously stated above, once you’re done with the Story mode……. that’s basically it.
You unlock free play and sod it, pretty much, as there are no real extras, and i would have preferred it shorter and more replayable, it’s not like there’s a collectible system or some optional objectives to entice replays. Sure, as stated before, some levels offer to diverge a little from the main path to find optional enemy hordes and extra bonus coins if you don’t go where the arrow wants you to immediatly, but that just adds to the total point score of the level…. but even if you cared to, there are no online leaderboards to show off that.
Also, confusingly after finishing a mode in Free Play, it boots you back to the game splash screen, and while i noticed some medals on top of the stage select screens, there’s no explanation if you can get better medals, how to do it or what for, though apparently are just for show and related to some trophies.
Yeah, there are some achievements, some extra difficulties, but there’s nothing of substance to do once you beat the game once, let’s be real.
Music is actually quite decent, nice compositions, fit the tone of both the series and the various locales, like the Corsica one, the english voice acting is decent, honestly, though you’d wish there were more lines of commentary or reactions spoken by Asterix or Obelix, after a while they just keep being recycled even more than they should
While it’s nowhere as buggy as XXL 3 or Ram From Hibernia and i had no performance issues, i encountered some technical oddities and glitches.
For example once managed to softlock myself… well, actually no, during a stage the game spawned the enemies outside of the area so i was able to glimpse them but not hit them as the stage didn’t scroll as it should, so i had to restart the level.
Once a saw a pirate fodder enemy walk into thin air, which fixed itself when the enemy walked off screen and then reentered it on the right plane/lane, and later in the game a lion enemy not lined up and so accidentaly floating near the coliseum walls, though this time i could whack him and proceed to the next stage instead of restarting the level.
not a huge issue since the stages these happened in aren’t that long, but still, an annoyance.
Overall, Asterix & Obelix: Slap Them All is a gorgeous looking yet mediocre retro styled 2D beat em up that old school to a fault, as has little variety yet it repeats/recycle itself a lot to pad out itself, feels almost unfinished so basic its combat systems are, the game design is engineered to antagonize anyone that doesn’t play it co-op with a friend with cheap difficulty spikes and even bigger hordes or recycled enemies.
Aside from some modern concessions like stamina management for some special moves, it’s so retro it almost hurts, to the point it could have been released on Genesis without having to change much, but even back on the SNES days, there were better beat em up, even arcade ports like King Of The Dragons had more interesting mechanics, and that had to cut out the 3 players options for technical reasons… this one could have been made easily as 4 players brawler, but wasn’t.
Also, at the moment of writing i haven’t played the arcade game Konami made back in the day, but intuition tells me that was better.
At least performance is good and there are no hiccups or slowdown, and despite the insane levels of repetitivity, the backgrounds and new locations do help as they’re a joy to see, but it’s a mediocre-ish title that i recommend only to fans of the genre that are also fans of the comics, maybe if it costed 20 bucks instead of asking 40 as MSRP, that’s a lot for one of these, especially since there are no real extras and no real incentive to replay it besides trophies.
The series and the fans do deserve better, i still believe this.
wait for a sale or just get in the Asterix Maxi Collection on PS5, which for 30 bucks MSRP has all the Asterix & Obelix XXL games, Ram From Hibernia, this and the sequel they released in late 2023, barely 1 year after the first, one simply titled Asterix & Obelix: Slap Them All 2!.
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