Golden Axe: The Duel

The Good
This one was a rip off of the 2 player fighting games that Capcom and SNK where doing like Street Fighter 2 and Samurai Shodown. The difference being that Capcom and SNK knew what they were doing. It featured Golden Axe characters and had nice graphics and some familiar visuals. The control was good enough, though I would have preferred there be more moves and super moves.

The graphics only utilize the Titan hardware for an irrelevant and even distracting zoom affect (the screen zooms in as you get closer to your enemy and zooms out as you get farther away). The moves where similar to Street Fighter 2, but more limited.

However, I kind of enjoyed this game considering I purchased it for $2.00 from a bargain been in 1999. Yeah, the Saturn wasn't around for long.

The Bad
I was really disappointed with Sega because they had a successful arcade game in Golden Axe: Revenge of Death adder that would have sold well and been enjoyable for Saturn owners. Yet they decided to port over this uninspired mediocre fighting clone.

This game was proof that Sega was run by brain dead monkeys. They actually put this game and the arcades where it failed miserably and then ported it over to a home system where guess what happened?

In fact, I found that just mashing buttons was as effective as using special moves in this game. There were an assortment of characters that were interesting enough, but not very many of them.

The Bottom Line
A mediocre game that is unfortunately the best Golden Axe game to come along since Revenge of Death Adder came out in the Arcades in 1992. If you like Golden Axe I can only recommend this for novelty value. Check out Revenge of Death Adder in the arcades if you can find it, or the original Golden Axe. Both games are better than this one. The marginal Golden Axe 2 and 3 for the Mega Drive are not really worth recommending (3 is particularly sad).