New GARGOYLES REMASTERED Is All Style And No Substance

Disney Games recently sent me a copy of the new Gargoyles Remastered to review. The game is currently available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, Steam, and Xbox Series X|S and I was stoked because Gargoyles was one of my favorite shows as a kid, but having never had a Sega growing up I didn’t get many chances to play this game. While this new remaster does a great job in making the game look good, it could have used a few quality of life updates to really make it shine.

Let’s start with a few things the game could have done better. While I appreciate its dedication to not changing the source game’s gameplay, this was a challenging game. The controls, compared to today's more responsive games, felt clunky. Sometimes it felt like I needed to push a button a few times to get the desired reaction. My biggest problem though is the hit boxes for attacking enemies and grabbing onto things to do jumping puzzles. I don’t mind a challenging experience for these kinds of games, but these hit boxes seemed to just change at random across the same type of enemy or background item to swing from. There were several jumping puzzles that made me want to quit because I could line up in the same spot every time I went to grab a pole to swing form only to have Goliath just fall through without grabbing it. My last problem was fighting bosses. If you die while fighting a boss and still have extra lives, the boss will return to full health as well, so you need to make sure you are taking it down in one life. The rewind feature was somewhat helpful for these moments, but they could still get frustrating. These were certainly challenges that existed in the original game, and honestly I don’t mind that much that they carried across. However, I would have liked to see this game include a close to original game version and then one in which these issues were addressed and updated.

I would have really liked to see more added to the game. This would have been a perfect chance to add more to the story or even add more playable characters. The remaster did well in sticking to the source material, but really missed an opportunity to build off it.

This game certainly nailed the updated look. Goliath looks amazing and the backgrounds also look great. I did have a few times where I got tripped up figuring out where to go because the levels aren’t always clear about what you can grab onto to swing and do a jumping puzzle. At any point you can switch back to seeing how the game looked originally which helped a lot with this issue. That is a feature I thought was really cool, I liked switching the visuals to see how far the game has come. I also did appreciate having difficulty levels to choose from since this game was a lot more challenging than I was expecting.

I enjoyed this remaster, but outside of the updated look it doesn’t really have much to offer. There are difficulty levels to choose from, but that’s about it as far as additions to the game. Remasters are a great opportunity to not only honor the original game but to add more to it for fans to enjoy. This did really well in updating the look, but didn’t do so well in adding anything new for past fans to discover and enjoy. If you really liked the original game I would recommend this. Overall, I would give it a 6/10.