Wizards & Warriors X: Fortress of Fear (Game Boy Review)

Wizards & Warriors X: Fortress of Fear
Platform: Game Boy
Released January, 1990
Developed by Rare
Published by Acclaim
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED (?)

Well………. At least it looks good. I’ve played enough old school Game Boy releases now that I shouldn’t be surprised anymore by fantastic graphics, but I constantly am anyway. Don’t get me wrong: this is no Nemesis (as seen in Konami Shmups: The Definitive Review) but there were a few places where I was impressed with the graphics. Not so much the gameplay.

I thought the first NES Wizards & Warriors was barely okay. I thought its sequel, Ironsword, was one of the worst games I’ve played, and it certainly had the worst sword combat I’ve ever experienced. This Game Boy title, technically the third game in the franchise but called Chapter 10 for some reason, is sadly closer to Ironsword than the original and one of the worst Game Boy titles I’ve ever played. Now Wizards & Warriors isn’t exactly the most beloved game and is probably one of my more eyebrow-raising YES! verdicts, so I recently replayed it. I wanted to make sure my review session wasn’t some kind of fever dream. It wasn’t, and I’m still willing to argue that the NES original doesn’t deserve to be vilified. I think a lot of the contempt for W&W out there has to do with the misleading cover art that features a shirtless beefcake barbarian style “Warrior” when such a character doesn’t exist in the game. Not even close. Also, yeah, the sword sucked back then too, but I don’t even consider the sword to be the main weapon in the original game. The boomerang-like Dagger of Throwing, which you get about a minute or two into the first level, does all the heavy lifting for the combat and pairs perfectly with the jumping-based level layouts. (shrug) So yeah, I like the first Wizards & Warriors. I also get why people wouldn’t, and it’s not hard to figure out where the series went wrong.

Once again, the problem is that the entire game is based around this sword that just isn’t satisfying to use. For this Game Boy release, take Ironsword’s combat, which was meant to be the primary attack method of the original game, and subtract the ability to skewer enemies while jumping, giving the player even less versatility than ever before. That had been the most effective attack in the sequel since there was no Dagger of Throwing. In Fortress of Fear, there’s NO jumping attack at all and, as always, there’s no OOMPH to the combat at all. Your sword’s sprite and the enemy sprites don’t feel like they exist in the same dimension, and the underwhelming armpit fart noise when you hit them doesn’t exactly make me think they’re being impaled by sharpened metal. Enemies don’t even blink to register damage. THIS is the new “worst sword combat ever” game. And now I’m also convinced the Dagger of Throwing was a last-second addition to Wizards & Warriors 1 that they resented adding to the game. How else do you explain Rare not realizing how important it was besides outright spite?

You can do a big, cutting vertical slice but it’s slow and doesn’t do more damage than a basic jab with the sword that’s twice as fast. So, wow, Ironsword was somehow made worse. Unbelievable.

If fans of the original are disappointed in the combat, just wait until they realize even the genre is different. Despite the hero and several enemies from the original game appearing with nearly identical sprites (like the eagle above), Wizards & Warriors X isn’t played in a way that fans of the series would expect. Instead of having to explore, locate keys and grind-up resources, Wizards & Warriors X is a linear side-scrolling platformer. What the fudge? This style of combat isn’t suitable for that at all! That would have been true even in the best circumstances, but the level design is so basic and bland that it’s surprising nobody making the game realized what a stinkeroo it was. The designers leaned far too heavily into the idea of building levels around hold-your-breath long jumps onto tiny moving platforms. Of, if not long jumps, outright blind jumps. Sometimes I mean that literally, as you’ll actually land on the moving platform but it’s positioned just below the view of the playfield. It’s like they drew the maps for the dimensions of a normal 80s/90s picture tube TV only to realize the Game Boy used a different aspect ratio. It happens a few times and it’s so inelegant. So are the amount of necessary jumps that have unavoidable falling damage.

This game couldn’t even do doors right. If a door is on the left wall, you can’t see it. So you have to bump into doors.

And the bad decisions keep coming. There’s chests and keys like before, but only two items of substance are found in the chests. One is a shield that, as far as I can tell, does nothing. Allegedly it halves your damage, but I didn’t notice it working. The “Boots of Jumping” increase your jumping height and length, but they’re lost if you die. Since collision is bad and your attacks are worse, with enemies seemingly tailored for jumping-based combat that wasn’t included, you’ll die a lot. It took until the final level of the game for Wizards & Warriors X to even get a heart beat since the level is set-up like a maze. But it must have just been the gas escaping postmortem because like two minutes later I beat the game just moving straight and taking doors when I came to them, then just stabbing the last boss blindly (and dying four times in the process) until he died.

The last boss has no room to dodge.What’s even dirtier is that in order to get to these platforms, you have to jump from a higher platform and accept fall damage. That happens a lot in Wizards & Warriors X. The game literally does nothing right from a gameplay perspective. The only nice thing I could think of to say about it? “It’s better than Castlevania: The Adventure.”

The total time investment is about 20 to 30 minutes. I want it back. I even kind of regret having to concede that the graphics are really good, because when a game that’s this bad looks as good as Wizards & Warriors on Game Boy does, it becomes almost sinister. Nobody sets out to make a bad game, of course, but when a bad game looks fun in still photos (such as the kind on the back of a box, for example) it feels cynical to me. So Fortress of Fear’s negative reputation is well-earned. Horrible game. It’s astonishing how far this potentially huge game franchise fell after the first title. Did anyone involved in a sequel not realize how much all the fun in the first game relied on the ultra-satisfying Dagger of Throwing? I’d say “one of these days, I need to play the first Wizards & Warriors without ever getting it.” Then again, with Ironsword and now Fortress of Fear, I’ve already sort of done that twice, haven’t I?
Verdict: NO!