Astérix (Sega Master System Review)

Astérix
Platform: Sega Master System
Released in 1991
Directed by Tomozō Endō
Developed by Sega
Never Released in United States
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

This is what I get for making assumptions.

I wanted to kick off a month focused on the Sega Master System with a game I thought had a pretty good chance of getting a YES! and Astérix seemed like a good choice. It came largely from the team that did the 8-bit version of Castle of Illusion. It even seems to have a similar engine. Well, it would seem my aim was a little off, because Astérix is all kinds of sloppy. Now, I’m not all that familiar with the Astérix media franchise, except that I know it’s been around for over six decades and it’s the second most-sold comic series after One Piece. Actually, the category it’s #2 in is “collected volumes” as it would drop to #4 if you factored-in “periodical single-issue floppy sales” which is what we call “comic books” in the US, with Superman and Batman moving ahead of it. But hey, that’s still a little ahead of Spider-Man! Of course, if you count comic magazines like Weekly Shōnen Jump, Astérix doesn’t even crack the top 15. My point is, it’s a very big deal. Naturally, there’s several video games based on Astérix, one of which I already reviewed in Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include – Part Two. Most of them never saw a US release. This is one of them, and I imagine this would have been a solid game at the time of its release. It’s not so solid anymore.

Obélix can break the blocks without needing to bomb them with the potions.

Astérix features twenty stages spread unevenly over eight game worlds, the first level of which you have to play once with each character. After level 1-1, you can choose between playing as the smaller Asterix or the lumbering Obélix in each stage, which factors into that stage’s pathway to the goal. Astérix can’t break blocks just by punching them, headbutting them or butt-stomping them. Obélix can do all the above, but he’s bigger, slower, and some of the platforming is more dangerous for him. Astérix needs to use explosive potions to take out blocks. You can both drop them on what you’re standing on by pressing down and the button, or you can toss them by holding up. You can even do a running toss for extra distance. The problem is the potions don’t offer much of a splash, and that can be a problem when you build the whole game around this mechanic. At about the halfway point, the game requires you throw the bombs on moving platforms that collapse into bottomless pits the moment YOU step on them. It repeats this shtick for the rest of the game, and the lack of splash just hurts this concept so much. Since I never really came close to timing-out, it just felt like busy work. When this is incorporated into auto-scrolling stages, which Astérix utilizes a few times too many, well, it’s kind of a disaster.

This is actually an auto-scrolling bit. So far in 2024, I’ve been surprised by quality auto-scrolling segments in games. Astérix reminds me why I’ve always hated auto-scrolling with some of the most sloppily handled I’ve seen.

The bombs are almost useless as offensive tools against enemies too, which isn’t so big a deal most of the time. You can punch enemies and Astérix’s downward thrusting punch has a DuckTales-like pogo stick spring to it, at least when you hit an enemy. Meanwhile, Obélix’s downward thrust, a butt-stomp, crashes through every block. But again, auto-scrolling rears its ugly head. For whatever reason, they also thought it would be great to include moving platforms with the auto-scrolling, without any synchronization. Are you kidding me? It forces players to hug the right wall, because you often only get one brief chance at making the right moves, and it differs between Astérix and Obélix. In the case of Obélix, his butt-stomp breaks ALL blocks under him. So, the auto-scrolling gives you a moving platform and a stack of blocks. If you don’t break the blocks before the moving platform hits them, it’ll change directions and you’ll die via lethal scrolling. Sounds like a fine, fair challenge, except the collision is really fickle.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Not that it matters much. Extra lives are plentiful, and the enemies don’t pose much of a threat. I never once was killed from running out of health. It was always death by auto-scrolling or falling into a bottomless pit. Games like that need fun exploration and peppy platforming, but Astérix is really slow. You get bottles of what I assume is mud at some point, which creates platforms in the lava. Hey, that sounds awesome. But the way they did it is the least fun, least exciting way of doing it. You throw the bottle and it makes the BANG and splashes. THEN, you watch the chemicals rise to the surface, THEN FINALLY you have a platform you can stand on for a couple seconds before it blinks away. Presumably this was done to give the game a more cartoonish, comical vibe. In practice, it just turns the item and its usage into a slog. There’s water-based platforming that’s the same way, only you throw a rock, which causes a water spout that you can briefly stand on. I’m totally fine with slowing down the pace of a platformer if it stays exciting. Land of Illusion isn’t exactly fast-paced, but it sure is a fantastic game. Astérix is really just very boring.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

And then the sloppiness kicks-in. There is something mechanically wrong with how they mapped the scrolling with Obélix. When you reach the end of a screen and have to exit vertically, you only have a fraction of a fraction of second before the game decides you’re going back down and changes back to the previous screen. It’s TERRIBLE. The worst switch-over to the next screen I’ve ever seen in platforming. Like in this screen:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I could not get out of the water because the game instantly decided I was trying to go back down and kept swapping me back to the previous screen immediately. Even mashing the button didn’t work. I actually had to use autofire to be able to get out of the water. Absolutely terrible, and it’s so much worse because Obélix is a LOT more fun to play as than the weaker, more generic-feeling Astérix. Obélix at least feels like a fresh take on platforming. It’s rare to use bigger, oafish type heroes in this genre, and in the case of Obélix, it doesn’t feel like a facade. He does feel like a different kind of platforming hero, in a good way. But, the problem with the scrolling happens with or without swimming every time you have to move immediately after the transition, and it kind of ruins the whole experience. The game has this great idea where you can punch a spring to move it over. Not only is this underutilized, but when you use Obélix, the screen swaps back to the previous screen before you even begin to fall downward. Did anyone play test this at all?

There ARE some nice set pieces, like this part. Climb into the cannon and drop one of the explosives and you get launched out. This was probably the highlight of the game and it comes early.

What little set pieces the game attempts are just not fun enough to make up for the really bad mechanics and mediocre level design. The object of the game is to find the keys that open the door in each stage. But they didn’t even bother with hiding the key in 80% of the levels. The pot that has the key that unlocks the door is usually just right next to the door. It took so long for the game to actually put the key away from the pathway you would take that I wondered why they even included this idea to begin with. There’s really only one level that I had to go looking for the key. One out of twenty. The game also stopped bothering to feature bosses after a while. The first couple levels have them, then the concept just vanishes. Apparently they took the fun with them.

After 19 levels of platforming, the game ends on an uninspired chariot race that has two types of obstacles to dodge. Sigh. Sorry, everyone. I thought this would be a better game.

I really did want to start Sega Master System August with a bang, and based on the pedigree, I thought this would be the best bet for that. Even though I know very little about Astérix as a property, I get the impression that the team that made this game weren’t fans themselves. There’s only tiny hints of comical violence and fisticuffs. When you punch an enemy hiding in a tree stump, everything flies off the enemy in layers, like a cartoon. That’s nice, I guess, but that’s as far as the humorous attitude gets. In the comic, they drink the potions, right? You don’t drink them in this. You throw an unlimited supply of them. Why even have them be potions at all? Just make them bombs, for god’s sake. They’re poorly implemented either way, with usually only one type of potion found in a level. There’s also a fire one that does the “light the dark room” trope, but once again, all it manages to do is slow down an already slow game. Astérix isn’t even a BAD game in all-caps. Instead, it feels like it had everything it needed to to be up there with the 8-bit Mickey Mouse games, and it just never really got going. You know how cars sound sad when their engine won’t start no matter how many times you turn the key? Astérix is the embodiment of that noise. It looks great, but it never gets out of the driveway.
Verdict: NO!