Why the new Gauntlet is wise to keep things simple

[Administrator]

Valkyrie... is about to diet. Enforced dieting. Starvation, you might call it, and it's sort of Valkyrie's fault. Early on in the dungeon, the monsters came slowly and the food was everywhere. Valkyrie gorged. But then things got tougher, her health took a battering, and she was always a second or five too slow to get to the turkey legs whenever the opportunity presented itself.
A dungeon crawler tuned for the chaos of four players battling against ridiculous odds and occasionally - accidentally, hopefully - battling against each other, Gauntlet doesn't sound too hard to get right. It's so simple, isn't it? But, much like the matter of getting to those turkey legs before they've all been eaten up, that simplicity is deceptive. Sequels to the 1985 original have struggled to improve upon it, and some have often missed the mark completely.
The new Gauntlet has a better than average chance of success, however. It's the first release from Warner Bros' new Vault initiative, which sees its arcade classics - which are generally Midway's arcade classics - reworked as snappy little digitally distributed games, yours for keeps for a small fee. Gauntlet comes with Arrowhead Game Studios as developer, which feels like a distinct advantage. That's the Arrowhead who made Magicka, the dial-a-spell dungeon crawler that offers the kind of hectic multiplayer chaos that fans of Gauntlet will already be familiar with.
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