I missed out on the adventures of Sir Daniel Fortesque when they originally released back in 1998, however, for most of my life I have heard from Lisa (our managing editor and my wonderful mom) that it was very fun when she played it back in the day. So, when they announced a full remake of the game, I was very intrigued, and thanks to Sony, I can now provide this review to you.

In the history books of the land of Gallowmere, a tale was spun of how the evil sorcerer Zarok was slain by Sir Daniel Fortesque. What the people do not know, is that in reality, Daniel was slain before the battle hardly began, taking a fatal arrow to the eye. Now, 100 years have passed and Sir Daniel rises from the grave, discovering that Zarok has returned and enslaved the world with his dark magic.

It is up to Daniel to defeat Zarok and his undead army, traversing Gallowmere and fighting all manner of creatures while attempting to achieve glory. If he can defeat Zarok, he will be allowed access into the Hall of Heroes and can clear away the shame of his previous demise.

MediEvil doesn’t particularly fit in any one category in terms of genre. There is action combat, adventure elements where you collect items such as runes and other quest-related objects, puzzle-solving, platforming, and more all wrapped in a singular package. You play as Dan, traversing levels, fighting enemies, and solving puzzles. You also fight bosses over the course of the game, which each have unique mechanics that make you think about how best to approach them.

In every level, there is a chalice you can acquire. The way you acquire it is by killing enemies and releasing their souls. Once you’ve filled the chalice, you can pick it up, and when you exit the level it will take you to the Hall of Heroes. The Hall of Heroes is where you can get new weapons and other boons. Collecting every chalice also opens up the true ending, which cannot be acquired otherwise.

Dan can acquire both ranged and melee weapons, such as a hammer, club, throwing knives, throwing spears, swords, axes, bows, and more. The targeting for these weapons is fairly simple, as Dan locks on to whatever foe is closest. It sometimes gets a little confused and may throw a weapon at a wall, but in most cases, it works as intended.

Throughout each of the levels, Dan will need to acquire runes that work as keys, though other items can be found as well. In most cases these items are used to solve puzzles in the same level, however, being thorough is important since some items are used more than once. It is also important to note that you can find merchant gargoyles in each level (especially long levels,) allowing you to replenish the ammo for your ranged weapons, and recharge your magical weapons.

Now, before I wrap this up, I feel like I should make you, as a consumer, aware of something important. This release of MediEvil was remade from the ground up in such a meticulous way, that strategy guides from the PlayStation release in 1998 still work. The entire game has been given a fresh coat of paint, with new voice acting for the lore, but other than that nothing has been changed or altered.

The team at Other Ocean Emeryville did their best to not only bring back the composers from the original game’s soundtrack but also made sure that this release was as faithful to the original as possible. With that in mind, they did polish the controls, as well as the camera, to make them more user-friendly. They also made sure that the only new additions to the lore and story were things that were left on the cutting room floor of the original.

The reason for my mentioning this is that while writing this review I did a little digging just to see what other people were saying about this release. I noticed that a few prominent outlets mentioned that the gameplay was “outdated” which made me somewhat confused. Isn’t that the purpose of remastering a game? Bringing an older classic to new audiences? Spyro Reignited Trilogy and Crash N.Sane Trilogy didn’t have their gameplay overhauled. Why should MediEvil?

My point is, this is a game with fun gameplay. It is exactly what you would expect if you’ve played the original, but it is also a blast for someone who has never played the original before. Calling it outdated when overhauling the mechanics wasn’t the point in the first place, just makes your argument irrelevant from where I’m sitting.

Now, with that point out of the way, I do have a few issues with MediEvil, and most of them probably come from the “staying faithful to the original” approach. The first issue is that there is absolutely no map. This doesn’t become a problem until later in the game when levels become larger, but it is still an issue nonetheless. I use Spyro Reignited Trilogy as an example here, because they had a map you could turn on or off as an option. MediEvil could benefit from this approach.

My other issue is two-fold. First, you do not start with full health when you enter a level. Instead, your health carries over from the last level you completed. This is a simple fix, because you can easily go back to easier levels, use health fountains and find energy vials to refill your life bottles, but the backtracking gets annoying after a while.

The other part of this issue, is that there are no checkpoints. The game autosaves when you finish a level, but aside from that if you die, you wind up having to do the entire level over again. The lack of checkpoints is a classic thing that most of us have forgotten about in the days of autosaving and plentiful checkpoints. However, in longer levels, this becomes punishing, especially if health fountains are few and far between.

This issue could be fixed by making health purchasable from merchant gargoyles since it would at least balance the difficulty a little bit. Overall though, these are minor complaints compared to how fun MediEvil is overall.

Even if you haven’t played the original game before, I would highly encourage you to play this remastered version of MediEvil. I have been having so much fun with it, and if you like classic action-adventure games, this is one you won’t want to miss. I really hope that Sony and Other Ocean Emeryville come together to bring MediEvil 2 to the current generation of consoles as well.

A PlayStation 4 review copy of MediEvil was provided by Sony Interactive Entertainment for this review.

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MediEvil

$29.99 USD

9

Score

9.0/10

Pros

• Beautiful Visuals
• Great Voice Acting
• Addictively Fun Gameplay
• Lots of Variety in Mechanics and Puzzles
• Lots of Weapons to Choose From

Cons

• No Map
• No Checkpoints
• Health Carries over Between Levels