Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Wrath of the Darkhul King GBA Review @ Gaming Target

Written by John Scalzo on July 30, 2003

Review: I'm the Slayer. Slay-er. Chosen One. She-who-hangs-out-a-lot-in-cemeteries. Look it up: "Slayer, comma, the."

Gather round children as I regale you with another story about the video game world back in my day. You see, back in my day we played 2D platformers on the NES and the Super NES and we liked it. Also in my day, every movie or TV show that was even remotely popular was turned into a video game. Regardless of how non-sensical it was for a game to be based off of certain properties. And for some reason I also wore an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. Wait, wait, scratch that, old age playing tricks on me. The point is that with the Game Boy Advance getting more popular every day a whole new generation of gamers gets to experience the wrath of the crappy licensed platformer.

What have they done to my beloved Buffy? That sentence pretty much sums up my feelings towards this tedious and ultimately pointless exercise. The scene of the crime is Buffy's fourth season. It's a few weeks after the events of "Hush", where the gruesome Gentlemen tried to silence the town. They're back and over the course of the game's sixteen levels Buffy must defeat them, a vampire leader, the demon cyborg Adam, and the Darkhul King. Very grand, very epic, except it's not and the game is much closer to the very opposite of those two things.

Wrath of the Darkhul King is a very simple platformer/beat 'em up when it comes right down to it. You enter a level, you slay a few demons, you jump some platforms, you find the exit. Repeat sixteen times. Occasionally switches have to be flipped or hostages have to be rescued to proceed, but that's the entire game in a nutshell.

The combat is rather mediocre. Buffy can kick, punch, and jump. She also has the ability to unleash combos and use a wide variety of weapons, but neither is necessary to beat up the baddies. Even if combos were needed, the control is much too sluggish to pull them off right. And sometimes it's difficult to perform even basic tasks like a running double jump that will be needed a lot. There are lots of weapons, but they don't do much to your run of the mill demons, stranger still they're very effective in boss fights. The game does use the vampire well though as vampires have to be staked to be rid of them totally. Unfortunately, this gets annoying after a while as vampires have to be knocked down before they can be staked and in most cases it's just easier to jump over them. So what we have is a fighting game where the fighting is superfluous.

The platforming elements don't fare much better because, as I said, the controls are very sluggish and the game just feels too slow. Buffy is a superhero, she shouldn't move like a senior citizen. It gets even more frustrating when you realize that platforms you can jump on and platforms that are in the background are often indistinguishable from each other. And you won't know until it's too late.

At least the graphics are nice. Buffy looks appropriately Buff and the digitized photos used between levels to propel the story are a nice touch (they even have a corny attempt at Buffy-like dialogue that just goes to show you, leave the Buffy scriptwriting to the professionals). The demons, vampires, and backgrounds all have an 8-bit look to them that isn't exactly ground breaking, but has a sort of charm to it. The music also seems like it was shipped in from 1989 and while it's incredibly cheesy, it works.

But there are just too many things holding this game back that should keep all but the most die hard Buffy fans from picking it up. Even at 16 levels long, the game can be polished off in a few hours once you get the hang of the controls. It's just too easy. Although I did like that the fate of the world is partly decided by a tic-tac-toe match. Joss Whedon would be proud.