Rygar: The Battle Of Argus Review [Wii]

Posted April 1, 2009 by Michael Curley in Reviews, Wii.

Reviewed on the Nintendo Wii

If you take God of War then remove the gruesome carnage, the naked women, the well crafted story and voice acting, then gave Kratos a preposterous hairdo that looks like it belongs on a Final Fantasy hero, you will probably end up with something close to Rygar: The Battle of Argus.

Rygar was doing his ancient Greek battling long before Kratos first emerged fully formed and screaming from SCEA’s head, but this installment feels like it owes a lot to the crazed Spartan’s exploits in ancient greece.  The series’ signature weapon, the Diskarmor handles a lot like Kratos’s Blades of Chaos, and the sweeping visuals and soundtrack are clearly inspired by the God of War series.

Unfortunately, while Rygar has its moments it lacks polish. The visuals are suitable, and they look pretty clean and expressive. The colors are almost cartoon bright, but they fit well enough, and the environments in the game are pretty well put together. There are some decent visual effects during the battles, and in general the game looks good.

The sound design is likewise good. There’s a good satisfying crunch whenever you hit things with the Diskarmor, and the music suits the heroic epic feel that the game’s looking for with the appropriate banging drums and singing choir when something suitably big comes into view. The voice acting though is delivered with all the grace and subtlety of a high school play. To be fair, the story is very cheesy and makes very little sense, so the voice actors can be forgiven for hamming it up a little. Plus hearing lines like, “and so I ate the flesh of a titan and became an evil one!” delivered with exaggerated drama is hilarious.

The gameplay  is good enough to keep you playing however, or at least it wont scare you away. While it lacks a certain amount of grace and fluidity that you may be used to if you’ve been playing God of War, the battle system works well enough. Dividing the three types of attacks (fast and straight, slow and sweeping, and close range and quick) between the three Diskarmors you get is a novel idea, but in practice it makes it more difficult to switch up attacks. The biggest problem though, is that the game doesn’t make use of the Wii’s controls in any meaningful way. In the main gameplay mode, there’s a couple of combos you can end by swinging the Wiimote in place of pressing another button, but that’s about it.

The Gladiator Mode; the game’s other play mode shows some potential for what the game could have been if it’d really taken advantage of the motion controls. It’s basically a long gauntlet against the game’s enemies and bosses, where the control scheme’s changed so you swing the Diskarmor in different ways depending on how you swing the Wiimote. It’s good fun, but doesn’t last long, and makes you wish they’d done a similar control scheme for the main game.

Rygar is a good game but it could have been better. It looks and plays well enough, and will keep you interested long enough to finish the fairly short main game. Refined controls and taking better advantage of the hardware will make a sequel good if they ever get around to it, but the cheesy and ridiculous story (Aristotle is the villain! Yes, that Aristotle.) is plenty entertaining.

Tagged as Rygar, Rygar: The Battle of Argus, Tecmo, The Battle Of Argus