Astérix Mega-Madness

Wanting to break the mold a bit from the usual platforming adventures through the world’s many locations, Infogrames commissioned the Swedish branch of Unique Development Studios to develop a family friendly action sports game featuring the Gaulish cast. The Swedish name for the game is Astérix: Galenskap i Kvadrat, which translates into “Astérix: Squared Lunacy” (Kvadrat is the geometric measurement of a square). It was apparently even crazier than this so all other releases simply use a variation of Mega Madness. It uses the same engine and general look from the 3D sections of Astérix: La Bataille Des Gaules released the year prior.

Village chief Abraracourcix has set up a series of competitive events for the Gauls to participate in, with the winner being honored by sitting next to the village head at the banquet held in celebration of their long successful fight with the Roman Empire. At your disposal you have the choice of Astérix, Obélix, Assurancetourix and strangely Agecanonix’s wife, with no Agecanonix in sight throughout the in game action. There are a total of 12 competitions to go through, with the main story taking place over 4 days with 3 events per day. In order to unlock the next day, you must rank number 1 between the 4 participants.

The events take form in the way of mini games, often inspired by other popular game genres or TV shows like American Gladiators or GUTS. Some of these events include Shield Bash, Recipe Run, Food Feast, Camp Crashing, Catapult Chase, Helmet Hoarding, Rowing Race and Boar Bash. The goal of each of these is to score the highest amount of points within a time limit and gain the highest combined score at the end of the day to go on in the festivities, failure to do so means you have to restart the day and try again.

Before each event, the controls will be displayed and are usually quite simple, using the directional buttons and the Square and X buttons but rarely any more. The game is quite family friendly in presentation and would work great for a family game to play on a Saturday night. It would work great if it was an actually good game, which sadly, it is not. The 12 games are for the most part rehashes of either each other or from other games, relying on the same basic layout masked under different names. Boar Bash and Recipe Run are the same games, with both pitting you on the same open field though with a slight adjustment of hitting boars instead of picking up ingredients. Food Feast uses an unresponsive rhythm game mechanic where you have to input the displayed directions to properly eat the food in front of you. There are some of these mini-games that uses some more originally designed ideas like the Shoot & Score, where one has to shoot to intercept enemy fire rapidly, but also here the game shows some serious flaws with an horrendous aiming system and limited field of view. Most of these games are devoid of any of the humor you would expect from Astérix. There are a few of these games that harbor some genuine fun gameplay like Shield Chase with its frantic mix of race and balancing that makes for some funny moments. Once these games are played a single time, they are unlocked in the Practice Mode with the ability to watch tutorial videos.

Graphically the game looks near identical to Astérix: La Bataille Des Gaules. The locations also have a similar look though feels more confined due to the nature of the game. Despite running on what seems to be the same engine, the controls are overly sensetive during the 3rd person controlled areas as if the characters sometimes are either on ice or underwater, and there is times of slowdown in the frame rate. There are some all new animated cutscenes done inhouse at UDS which look quite good and feature some of the signature humor from the Astérix franchise, though not enough to balance out the monotone feel of the rest of the game. The music has its moment though even this fails to live up to the excellent work of 2DB the year before. It was handled by Christian Bjöklund who also worked as the lead sound designer for Just Cause 2.

Ultimately, this game falls into the category of cheap licensed tie-in, offering little new and stale ideas that would fail to entertain an Amish man even if it was his first video game experience. Apart from the exclusive cutscenes, there little reason to play at all, even for the most die hard fan of the French favorite.

Two versions were released, one for PlayStation and one for Windows. The Windows version features 4 player support, higher resolution graphics and cutscenes and seems to be lacking the slowdown that can be found on the PSX. As always, the cover illustration was done by Uderzo himself.

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