Gaul-den Wonder! Asterix & Obelix XXL Romastered
A fresh coat of paint for a classic PS2 adventure
In 2003, French game studio Étranges Libellules (“strange dragonflies”, if you were wondering) released Asterix & Obelix XXL, a 3D action adventure game based on the enduringly popular Asterix comic books by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo that have been published sporadically since 1959. It was by no means the first video game based on the series - there have been dozens, with my personal favourite being the Master System game from 1991 simply titled “Asterix”. XXL released on PS2 and GameCube, and a sequel followed in 2006.
A few years ago, prolific publisher Microids announced a remaster - or “Romaster” - of the two XXL games. Our friends the dragonflies had long since disbanded, so development duties fell to OSome Studio, who previously had made the visually striking survival horror game White Night in 2014. Perhaps an odd choice of studio to remaster a cartoony platformer, but it seems to have been an effective one…
I’ve recently played and completed the PlayStation 4 version of Asterix & Obelix XXL Romastered. I hadn’t ever played the PS2/GameCube original - just one of those games that I’d always spotted on store shelves but never got to the top of my list - so I was happy to have a chance to try out this classic game with some modern bells and whistles.
A bright, shiny remaster
The first thing I noted on playing it was how nice it looked! OSome Studio have done a bang-up job here, updating all of the textures and animations for Asterix, Obelix, the Roman baddies and all of the environments. The life gauge and other HUD elements are crisp and the game displays in a full-screen 16:9 aspect ratio, rather than the original game’s 4:3. It’s very brightly lit - almost overbright at times - but since this is a cartoon world where everyone has exaggerated proportions and not, say, Rome: Total War, this is bearable.
If you don’t like all these new shiny enhancements and want the authentic PS2 experience, you can just switch them off with a single button-press. Hit R2 and the screen contracts back to 4:3 and all of the textures, HUD and everything else pop right back to how they were in the PS2 days! It’s always impressive when modern remakes of 2D retro games do this, like Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap or Alex Kidd DX, but doubly so for 3D games, and I’m happy that it’s becoming a more common option in many retro remakes these days.
In fact, XXL Romastered takes it a step further and incorporates the texture-switching system into a new set of side missions! You’ll come across special stones during the adventure which will challenge you to collect all of the Roman helmets along a fixed route within a time limit, except that some of the helmets can only be collected in “retro” mode, and vice-versa. I thought this was a neat way to show off the technique, even though some of the challenges are punishingly difficult and require almost frame-perfect reactions to get a gold medal.
The game’s soundtrack has also been updated, although not being familiar with the original, it was often hard to tell without switching back and forth between old and new a few times. It seems there’s music playing in areas which didn’t have any in the original game, too.
What am I going to do with all these helmets…?
So far so good. Asterix & Obelix XXL Romastered looks the business on modern hardware, which is the one thing you’d expect for a remaster of a 20-year-old game. It’s just a shame that that 20-year-old game happens to be Asterix & Obelix XXL.
The game sees you travel through various European countries to rescue your fellow villagers, who’ve been kidnapped by Caesar’s forces. Each time you rescue one, they give you a piece of the map and a clue as to where the next one is. And every step of the way there’ll be Roman legions to stop you, just like in the comics. You’ll bash Romans in Gaul, then bash Romans in Switzerland, then bash Romans in Egypt, and finally bash thousands upon thousands in Rome itself. If this sounds repetitive, you’re right on the money. Platforming puzzles break up the near-constant swarms of Roman soldiers, but these aren’t especially challenging.
There are a limited number of enemy types: basic spear-wielding Romans, archers, centurions, the occasional pack of lions, and a couple of shield formations that take a magic potion power-up to blast through. All of these troops are dispatched in exactly the same way: by mashing the Square button at them until they fly comically off the screen. For the first few encounters this is fine, but then the creeping realisation hits you that this game’s combat system isn’t very deep. You can pick up some special combos and execute them if you can fill your combo meter, but these are either flashy but no more effective than just bashing away, or so game breaking that you’ll want to spam them every chance you get, with no middle ground.
“What about Obelix?”, you might ask. After all the game is called Asterix & Obelix XXL, and he accompanies you throughout, but you can’t switch to him freely - only when certain puzzles require his skills. For example, in many puzzles Obelix must pull Asterix along on a platform suspended on a rope-and-pulley system, or press switches to boost him over walls so that he can unlock a gate to let Obelix through. If you happen to have to fight Romans while in control of Obelix, he plays exactly the same as Asterix with no unique moves - a missed opportunity. He can break metal boxes, but often I’d notice these right as I completed the puzzle that Obelix was needed for, and control would return to Asterix with no way to switch back.
Roman helmets are littered across all of the levels, functioning as collectibles, currency, and padding to make it feel like the levels are longer than they really are. Boxes upon boxes of them are everywhere, and if you stop to break open all of them to claim the helmets inside, you could easily double the game’s playtime. But what you get for these helmets is lackluster: they let you buy the combo moves I mentioned earlier, unlock some artwork in the extras menu, and that’s all. Once you’ve bought everything you want, you can safely ignore helmets entirely.
I don’t want this review to end on a list of nitpicks, and I could go on: the end of level boss is the same mechanical Roman contraption every time just with more Romans and traps around it; you are constantly stopped by a Roman spy who functions as a tutorial helper and signposts your next objective, but his dialogue is badly translated and often misleading; and for reasons passing comprehension, Asterix speaks with a Welsh accent. But I will say that the game’s save points are the funniest I’ve seen in quite a while, and I often found myself bringing up the save menu for no reason…
Verdict
Now, don’t get me wrong - as I said before, OSome have done a fantastic job, and possibly the only job they could, by making this PS2-era game look as good as it does, and I give them a lot of credit for the thoroughness of their remaster. In all other respects, Romastered is a 100% faithful recreation of the original game, which isn’t as much of a compliment as it normally would be.
XXL is a competent 3D action platformer, but its repetitive enemy encounters, pointless helmet loot, inability to switch characters freely (and no real distinction between them when you do), and general lack of imagination in its level and puzzle design can’t just be put down to its age - this game feels old and limited in comparison to many other 3D platformers of that era. It may be that OSome felt they couldn’t make any significant changes to the gameplay, and concentrated only on the visuals, but to me it’s a missed opportunity.
OSome must have thought they could do better, though, because in 2019 they created an original sequel - XXL 3: The Crystal Menhir - which took the basic skeleton of XXL and gave it a lot of much-needed quality-of-life improvements, correcting almost all of my gripes about the first game in the process! I’ve still got XXL 2 to play and review, though, so I’ll be sure to give you all the full rundown once I do.
Scorecard (out of 5)
