Warner Bros. Interactive Presents Gauntlet: Re-made for the 21st Century

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, together with developer Arrowhead Games, is bringing back Gauntlet, a classic dear to of-a-certain-age gamers’ hearts. Gauntlet was unveiled at GDC last week (with all the bells and whistles, including renting out a bar near GDC and offering free turkey legs) and we had a chance to do a ten-minute dungeon crawl with some of the developers.

Gauntlet saw its first iteration in 1985, as a  fantasy themed hack and slash arcade game that allowed up to four players at a time (emphasis added for those of you who don’t remember how freaking cool that was) and was ported out to the NES in ’87 as Gauntlet II; it was re-booted in 1989 as Gauntlet Legends across multiple platforms. In all of the versions, there were four main characters: the Warrior, the Wizard, the Archer and the Valkyrie, who had set attributes and abilities and ran through a world killing things and getting loot (perhaps most fondly remembered is the narration in the original games; “Red Warrior needs food” was voted one of the top video game lines ever–which says something about video game dialogue we don’t have time to go into here).

In the 2014 Gauntlet, those classic characters remain, and can be played single player or co-op. It also retains that hack-and-slash arcade feel, with a top-down camera view and dungeon crawls complete with waves of undead and other monsters.

It’s a solid, well-done game. The monsters are sufficiently threatening, the dungeons have the expected spawn/loot/spawn/loot rhythm (with an added layer of difficulty regarding the collection of keys to open doors, behind which a player could see loot, or live-saving food), and the four classes have been upgrade with abilities and skills, but maintain that Gauntlet-feel.

However, while entertaining to play, (and to be fair we only got ten minutes on one class, warrior, which isn’t our preferred class to begin with), it didn’t feel much different than other dungeon procedurals out there. But if your looking to spend some time killing bad guys and clearing out dungeons, it’s definitely a solid bet.

Gauntlet is expected to be released this summer on Steam, for both PC and the upcoming Steam Machines. There is no price point as of yet.

What do you guys think? Do you remember the original? Sick of arcade hack-and-slash? Let us know in the comments!

You can check out the game play in the trailer below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wepHMRMYqTw