It's Hard To Be A Proper Undead Without A Jaw - MediEvil Resurrection

It's been a while, Sir Daniel Fortesque. Released towards the end of the PlayStation's prime, MediEvil was a quirky, amusing, and mostly entertaining action/adventure game. It never really caught on with the PS fanbase despite some favorable reviews, but it did spawn a sequel that didn't make much noise either, though seeing it was released prior to the PS2's launch this is no real surprise. Which explains why the franchise hasn't so much as made a peep on the PlayStation 2. However with the PSP comes new promise, and here comes MediEvil rising from the grave. Dubbed MediEvil Resurrection, this new installment brings the same strange humor, characters, and action to Sony's portable, and adds a horde of multiplayer and mini-games to the mix. However thanks to a flawed combat system and wild controls, this one handles like it should have been kept in cold storage for a few more months instead of rushing it out to meet the September UK launch date. Fans of Sir Dan will be pleased to see him return, but the pleasure will likely be short-lived in lieu of total disappointment.

This new MediEvil is not a sequel; it's more like a remake of the PlayStation original and thus the storyline is the exact same thing. Your hero is Sir Daniel Fortesque, though there's something unusual about him. See, Dan is dead. Not only is he dead, he has only one eye and his jaw fell off. Otherwise he's your prototypical dead skeleton come to life, only he has this little one-eyed dude named Al-Zalam living inside his empty eye socket. However, Dan is a hero to his home of Gallowmere, as the legendary warrior was the one who killed the evil sorcerer Zarok and brought peace. At least...that's the story. In truth, Dan was a cowardly fighter and died instantly when an arrow nailed him right between the eyes, and Zarok simply got away and went into hiding. But now he's back, and now Dan and his missing jaw are out to truly defeat Zarok and then Mr. Fortesque will live up to this false legend. As you might expect, the story definitely falls towards humor, since everyone is pretty much goofy as hell; even Zarok as he still has trouble nailing his diabolical evil laugh.

Though it's billed as an action/adventure game, MediEvil Resurrection is more straight up action since there's only a handful of puzzles and tricky jumps, and most of your time will be spent using the various weapons killing stuff. Through each stage, Dan will need to fill a chalice with souls, until it's 100% filled, to actually complete the map. So you'll be doing a lot of fighting. As a side goal, you'll need to find a special golden chalice – find it, and the true heroes will bring Dan a new weapon to use that's powerful enough to handle upcoming stages. There's plenty of options, like clubs, hammers, swords, daggers, spears, and a bow & arrow setup for those long-distance kills. What sucks is how this is handled; in order to switch weapons in battle, you have to hit select and find what you need, when a quick select could have been far more handy. Alas Sony Cambridge mapped the movement controls to the d-pad instead so there's no buttons to actually execute this. It's a small thing but since there are moments when switching weapons is a necessity, this break in the action is a bit jarring.

Actual combat is a bit unwieldy as well, thanks to loose controls and awkward aiming system. By holding L you can lock onto an enemy, and Dan will walk instead of run, but sometimes he'll target the wrong threat or simply whiff at the air. The aiming is far more useful when using projectiles but its range is pretty short. Whiffing at air is a pretty common occurrence in this game as is – most likely you'll be wildly swinging weapons hoping to hit stuff, especially since Dan moves with such sensitivity that he flails around like a fish out of water half the time, whether you use the analog nub or the d-pad. You sorta get used to it, and since the game is pretty forgiving that it doesn't make it too hard or cheap, but people used to precision action games might find themselves really lost trying to get a handle on things. Dan does have a nice selection of attacks, depending on your weapon. With swords for instance, you can charge up a very strong attack with X, or use Square to execute a spinning attack. Triangle does a dash move which can knock down some enemies but mostly is good for clearing space to escape being cornered or surrounded.

The variety of weapons does mix things up but Resurrection is your basic hack & slash, just without a lot of frills. Dan has a health meter and can find health bottles to restore it, and there's some regeneration fountains here and there as well. You can also find gargoyle merchants around most levels, who sell shield repairs, knives or arrows for projectile weapons, and those health bottles, but you need to find the currency randomly dropped around the world to afford it. Every stage has the same patterns; kill the undead coming towards you, find runes scattered about to open doors, maybe hit a fetch quest, solve a couple puzzles...then rinse and repeat. On the other hand, boss battles are usually enjoyable, mixing traditional pattern tactics with more modern 'weak spot' encounters. You'll see this right away, with the first boss, that has a set pattern to evade and a single point you have to hit with projectiles, while the 2nd boss battle has enemies that can only be struck at a certain time. So at least these encounters are pretty interesting.

In addition to the single player game, there's Ad Hoc multiplayer options, for deathmatches, flag capturing, and whatnot. So you and your friends can flail around like idiots swinging at air together. However it should have probably been online since it's more logical. The game does support Game Sharing, so you can send over a small version of it to a friend with a PSP to play, and you also can beam over a demo of Wipeout Pure, so they can experience a game that's actually good. Along with this, there's a horde of amusing minigames, from whacking Zarok dolls to exterminating rats along with about a half-dozen others; many of which are more enjoyable than the campaign. However at the start you only can choose two of them, and the rest have to be unlocked by getting to certain parts of the single player adventure. So saddle in. Sony Cambridge are to be commended for packing all these extra options into the game seeing you can plow through the main game in about 10 hours or less, but more time really needed to be spent fixing up all the things wrong.

As the PSP is far more powerful than a PS1, MediEvil Resurrection did get a nice visual overhaul. CG cutscenes are nice, and there's a really neat gothic theme of Gallowmere full of weird stuff. Alas the game is a bit too fast and thus the screen ghosts a lot which gave me a serious headache, like it was an old-school portable game on the original Game Boy. Other than that it looks pretty serviceable and actually is one of the better looking 'ports' on the system. On the audio end, MediEvil is well voiced by a group of talented actors who bring the goofy Gallowmere atmosphere to life and actually make the game and story pretty amusing – one of the only real strong points you'll find if you're patient enough to slog through the story. I suggest turning subtitles on though since the voice is out of whack with the other effects. Dan automatically has subtitles when he speaks, since it's all muffled since, you know, he lost the jaw and everything. The music is equally gothic and epic, and there's a lot of creepy sound effects and the like to show off the halloween-like world.

The Last Paragraph

MediEvil Resurrection nails a whole lot of things, but doesn't quite get a handle on its most important aspect – gameplay. With a bit more tuning, the controls would have been a bit tighter and intuitive, there would have been more variety in the stages, and the multiplayer options would be more useful, and most importantly, the game would have been a whole lot more fun. Instead you get a collection of fun minigames that you have to unlock by playing through this flawed single player game, which is hardly motivation. As a MediEvil fan, it's sad to call this one a disappointing affair, but it is, and you're better off picking up another action game for PSP, as this one probably won't do any good. If you're very patient and can handle the issues, the game can be entertaining in spurts if you like hacking and slashing, but the rest of the PSP userbase probably will find themselves annoyed and bored after just a few stages. If they give this franchise another go, hopefully it'll have more time to mature into something good. And hopefully it'll be on PlayStation 3.