Golden Axe review: swords, magic and the little blue thieves

A dwarf with a battle axe, a barbarian with a broadsword and a warrior woman with a longsword walk into a ransacked village. Skeletons climb out of the ground. And somewhere in the middle of it, a tiny blue thief runs past carrying potions.

A brawler in fantasy armor

Golden Axe lets players control one of three warriors fighting to free the land of Yuria from Death Adder. Gilius Thunderhead is the dwarf, Ax Battler the barbarian and Tyris Flare the Amazonian, and each casts a different kind of magic: lightning, earth or fire. Makoto Uchida, who designed it, loved the Conan films and said he wanted a Double Dragon that was not a Double Dragon. That is exactly what it is: the walk right and hit structure you already knew, dressed as a fantasy novel cover.

What makes the characters different is their magic. Each has a different maximum number of bars and a different range of attack, so choosing a hero is choosing how much magic you get to hoard.

The best twist on a formula is one change that the whole game has to bend around.

Magic you have to steal

That change is the thieves. Magic hurts every enemy on the screen, and its force depends on how many bars you have filled. The bars fill with potions, and potions come from kicking the little blue thief who runs through the stage. A green thief drops food instead. So in the middle of every fight there is a second game: chase the thief before he escapes, even if it means turning your back on three soldiers.

Then there are the bizarrians, the beasts you can ride once you knock the enemy rider off. The Cockatrice swipes with its tail, and later a dragon breathes fire. Stealing an enemy's mount and using it against his friends never stopped being funny.

What it meant back then

Uchida had made Altered Beast before this, and Golden Axe felt like the promise of that game kept. In American arcades of the late eighties it was the sword and sorcery cabinet, the one kids who read fantasy paperbacks and played tabletop games gravitated toward, at the mall arcade and the roller rink and the back of the pizza place.

The arcade version even ended with a joke about those rooms: three children playing a Golden Axe machine in a closed arcade, until the characters escape into the real world. Anyone who ever stayed until the lights went off got that joke.

Playing it today

It is slow and stiff next to later brawlers, and the difficulty is sharp. But the thieves still make every stage feel like a little heist, and riding a dragon into a crowd of soldiers is still one of the better feelings the arcade offered. Kick every blue thief. You know you will anyway.