Golden Axe: Beast Rider

Golden Axe: Beast Rider is a 2008 action hack-and-slash developed for Xbox 360 by Secret Level and published by Sega as an attempt to revive the long-dormant Golden Axe brand in a fully three-dimensional form, more than fifteen years after the series' last main installment. The player takes control of the warrior Tyris Flare and travels through a fantasy world full of barbarians, undead, and various monsters, with the main storyline building on the mythology established by the arcade trilogy of the late eighties and early nineties, framing the game as a sort of bridge between the individual installments.

Compared to the original 2D brawlers, where the player simply moved across the map beating up enemies, Beast Rider emphasizes chained combo strikes, collecting experience to unlock new abilities, and above all, saddling and controlling various creatures – from griffins through giant lizards to dragons – which can be used to overcome environmental obstacles and slaughter enemies right from their backs, a mechanic none of the previous installments had. However, the game struggled with stiff controls, a confusing camera, and repetitive level design, which reviews at the time criticized, and this is also why it never became the comeback for the series that Sega had hoped for. The music and visual style, meanwhile, remain faithful to the Golden Axe fantasy world – barbarian fortresses, bone thrones, and the same types of monsters as in the arcade trilogy give the game the stamp of a sequel despite its completely different genre and the sixth console generation's technological execution.

Why play it: Beast Rider is more for players with a soft spot for the Golden Axe series and curiosity about how a twenty-year-old arcade classic handled the transition into 3D action on sixth-generation consoles, than for those looking for a technically brilliant and polished hack-and-slash.