Asterix & Obelix Slap Them All!

My first hour with Slap Them All felt like someone finally got the Asterix license right. The art is genuinely stunning: hand-drawn character animation that lifts its style directly from the classic comic panels, vibrant backgrounds, and exaggerated slapstick that lands every time Obelix catapults a Roman clean out of his sandals. The presentation is not a minor selling point here; it is the reason this game exists and it is the thing it does better than almost any licensed brawler I can think of. Under that beautiful exterior sits a side-scrolling beat-em-up with about four hours of good ideas stretched across fifty levels. The structure is familiar: you pick Asterix or Obelix, move left to right, and clear waves of Roman soldiers before the game lets you advance. Asterix plays quicker and leans on a spin-attack special, while Obelix is a slower, harder-hitting bruiser with a grab set that lets him punch, slam, or floor-wipe whoever is unfortunate enough to be in his hands. Both characters share a stamina bar of five lightning charges spent on special moves, a grab button, a dash triggered by double-tapping the directional input, and a block. That is genuinely the full mechanical toolkit, and the enemy design never really forces you to use all of it. The AI produces roughly three archetypes: a basic melee grunt, a charging heavy, and a ranged javelin thrower. All three show up in more or less the same patterns from Britain to Gaul, and the game re-skins rather than reinvents them as the acts progress. The campaign adapts six storylines from the comic series, which is a nice structural hook, but the level design rarely distinguishes one location from another in gameplay terms. What keeps early sessions fun is the sheer visual chaos of a screen full of Romans getting launched in different directions, and the two-player local co-op mode, which is clearly where the difficulty balance was calibrated. Solo, you can swap between characters when one runs low on health, but the game pushes hard toward having a second player present. Ranged enemies chip your health quickly when you are focused on a melee cluster, and without a partner covering angles, some stretches become frustrating in ways that feel accidental rather than designed. There are four difficulty settings, but even the harder options do not inject genuine complexity; they just make the same patterns hurt more. The missing options menu is a real problem on PC. Volume sliders, key rebinding, resolution control: none of it was present at launch, and Steam reviewers were vocal about it. The game is also purely local co-op with no online mode, which in 2021 felt like a significant omission for a two-player-focused brawler. No progression system, no unlockables, no score chasing that actually motivates replays. Once you finish the campaign, which runs roughly four to five hours, there is a freeplay mode to revisit levels and not much else. If you grew up reading the comics or have a younger player to share a couch with, there is genuine warmth here worth experiencing. The animation quality is exceptional, the soundtrack holds up, and the slapstick spectacle of Obelix pile-driving a legionnaire into the earth never quite gets old enough to actively annoy you. But genre fans who come expecting the depth of Streets of Rage 4 or even a modest upgrade system will find the floor disappointingly bare. Alex, Scout Team