Asterix and Obelix XXL2

I went in expecting a breezy licensed brawler and came out with a complicated relationship. Asterix and Obelix XXL2 is OSome Studio's 2018 remaster of a 2005 PS2 action-platformer set in Las Vegum, a Roman-built Vegas-style theme park, and the whole thing plays exactly as that description implies: colorful, repetitive, occasionally delightful, and unmistakably dated. The core loop has you swapping freely between Asterix and Obelix as you brawl through six distinct zones of Las Vegum, rescuing kidnapped Gauls and chasing down a suspiciously treacherous Getafix. Asterix is small and quick enough to slip through tight passages; Obelix is a wrecking ball capable of bulldozing obstacles and flinging stunned Romans like fleshy boomerangs. Dogmatix can be called in for crowd control. Combat has a real combo system underneath the mashing, you can grab a centurion, use him as a whip against nearby soldiers, throw him to your partner for a ground-slam shockwave, or spend collected coins on new moves and health upgrades via shops scattered across each area. On paper, it goes deeper than it looks. In practice, wave after wave of identical Romans starts wearing thin well before the credits roll, and the difficulty modes (there is a hard and an extreme setting) add challenge without really adding variety. What genuinely holds up is the game's absurdist sense of humor. The whole thing was originally marketed as the first video-game parody, and that spirit survives the remaster intact. Romans dressed as Mario, Sonic, Pac-Man, Rayman, and a barely-disguised "Larry Croft" wander the levels. Mortal Kombat and Tekken imagery plasters the walls. It is extremely 2005-brained and entirely sincere about it, which is funnier than it has any right to be. Fans of the original comic series will also find the awful puns, roast boar as health pickups, and Obelix's running complaints about being banned from the magic potion all lovingly preserved. The remaster side of things is less convincing. In-game character models and environments look clean enough for 2018, but the pre-rendered cutscenes were left at their original PS2 resolution, blurry, letterboxed, and jarring on any modern screen. The PC version has documented performance issues including stutters and slow load times that community workarounds can help with but not fully fix. The camera is the other persistent offender: vertical adjustment maps to zoom rather than tilt, so getting snagged behind walls is a routine frustration rather than a rare one. Critics landed around a 60/100 average across platforms, and that feels about right. Who is this for? Grown-up fans of the original 2005 release who want a tidier version on a modern machine will probably enjoy it. Kids who find the Asterix comics funny will too, the tone is pitched squarely at that audience and it works on those terms. Anyone coming in cold without that franchise affection, or expecting a polished modern brawler, is likely to find the seams showing too clearly to overlook.

Alex · Scout Team

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