Review: Asterix & Obelix XXL Romastered

There is a lot to love about Asterix & Obelix, many of my childhood memories for example are from watching movies from the iconic duo. As much as I love the franchise and some of the previous Asterix & Obelix XXL games, this remaster or romastered version of the first one is far from what these Gaulish warriors deserve. The biggest feature is that it is an exact replica with only improved visuals, with a press of a button you go back to the old visuals, neat! Kinda like what the Halo remasters have too. Problem is that everything that was bad about the first game is still in this Asterix & Obelix XXL Romastered version and nowadays that’s even more painful as gaming has changed a lot.

We played Asterix & Obelix XXL Romastered for six hours on Xbox One and a short hour on Xbox Series X.

What we liked!

• Asterix & Obelix versus Julius Caesar: Story and setting wise there is just nothing really similar to play on Xbox. Levels inspired by Romans and created for Asterix & Obelix fans is the best part of this otherwise forgettable videogame. Using dogmatix to create an opening and stun enemies, using Panoramix as a save point. The fan service is clearly present, in some unexpected and familiar ways.

Somewhere between

• A little disappointing gameplay: The platform genre has evolved so much and the developer sadly decided to have an exact copy of the gameplay in this remastered version. They did add a nice mechanic that forces you to switch to the 2003 and Romastered version but that hardly saves it from being a bit unnecessarily in general. Take for example the collecting of literally thousands of Galea helmets, I never saw a game with more collectibles for absolutely no reason. What utterly frustrates me, even more, is that I had over 50.000 of them, start a sub-quest for delivering only 2000 of them but that they had to be from a near-impossible slide mini-game. Well, impossible until I switched over to the 2003 version and noticed that it was considerably slower and easier to collect everything while sliding down. I have no other word than outdated for the combat too, honestly, it is plain boring to fight the Legionnaire forces. They come in impressive numbers but they might have been chickens without heads, as they hardly do anything smart. The constant one-button smashing to defeat the same enemies over and over again doesn’t do the game any good. I regularly felt as playing a faint decoction of Dynasty Warriors, with even more repetitive combat.

What we disliked

• Underwhelming visuals: With a tap of a button you go back to the version from 2003. A major disappointment immediately emerges here. The difference between the old and the new version is of course clear, but not exactly what you would expect from visuals nowadays. There is still a crazy amount of objects and even environments that appear out of nothing (pop-up) and levels are empty and full of invisible barriers.
• Performance and camera issues: It seems that Dogmatix runs away with the camera from the moment you leave the wide-open spaces and enter caves or buildings. While you can manually control the camera it fails to be something you can rely on. Something else entirely is the mildly abrupt performance, I first noticed this while playing the ice slide mini-game and when facing multiple enemies. The frame rate is far from stable and struggles to keep up, a bit puzzling as the visuals aren’t that good.

CONCLUSION

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