Golden Force [Xbox]
Developed by Storybird Studio, Golden Force is an action-platformer that follows the four mercenaries that make up the Golden Force, as they attempt a big mission in order to secure the mountain of gold that the evil Demon King has in his possession, in order to keep their vacation going! You’ll take control of one of the four characters: Gutz, Spina, Drago, or Elder; with a two-player option being available as well for a second character to be brought into the fray.
Taking place in the Muscle Archipelago, across four different islands with a total of 22 levels, you’ll face off against the Demon King’s henchmen, as well as his five Generals - in the form of Salsa, Nacho, Burritos, Tortilla and Tacos, that are named completely unexpectedly from their appearances, before ultimately taking on the Demon King himself.
Done in a chunky pixel-art style, it is very visually pleasing with bright colours and varied character designs ranging from the gorgeous main characters to the ugly, repulsive enemies, with some looking straight up like something from Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case. Defeating enemies rewards you with a satisfying explosion of blood, guts and coins, which is always good. Bosses are huge, although quite blandly designed compared to the other enemies - and are particularly challenging, not in that they’re difficult to figure out - but they seem to absorb a lot of damage, and take an absurd amount of time to defeat, leading to you taking a lot of unnecessary hits over time from some of their unavoidable attacks.
There are power-ups that you can find along the way, that will give you temporary damage boosts such as Fire and Ice, allowing you to deal greater damage to your enemies. There are switches that rotate the world in some areas, and to activate these you’ll often need to deflect projectiles or hit skulls off of them - but getting the aim right for this needs to be surprisingly precise. There are frequently areas of danger that you’ll not notice until it’s too late - such as steep drops that require a timed jump to reach platforms after the jump (that you’ll only realise after dying the first time) and spiked pathways that will damage you, where you’ll need to wait for platforms to rise up through the spikes, but this is lower down than the platform you drop down from, so you’ll only realise it when you inevitably lose some health.
There are collectibles in the form of golden tablets and shells, and these, along with coins, can be spent at the in-game shop. Shells and tablets can be spent on decent upgrades, however your coins can only be used on temporary buffs, which feels like a joke since these items can be found in the world anyway, and don’t last for very long (especially given how expensive they are!). Likewise, there are treasure chests dotted all around the world to give you a lot of coins - and will often surprise you with a little treasure goblin that will pop out to catch you off guard, but due to the pointless nature of the shop items, collecting these coins seems a little unnecessary, too.
Overall, Golden Force is fun but flawed. We ran into a few issues where button prompts are given to you to explain how to do certain things, but the icon to show which button to press is just a blank grey circle - not matching any of the available options on Xbox which is frustrating, since we’re no doubt missing out on a powerful bit of assistance that would come in handy against bosses! Available digitally for £16.74 on the Xbox Store, or in a physical copy from retailers such as Amazon for around £20-£25, it’s pretty expensive in our eyes, so we’d probably recommend waiting on a sale if this interests you.
In the end, we decided to give Golden Force the Collecting Asylum rating of 6.5/10.
Are you interested in Golden Force? What do you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to PixelHeart for the Golden Force Xbox review code!
