When I think of childhood comics I think of Peanuts, Tintin, and of course Asterix & Obelix. Asterix & Obelix, and Tintin feel outside the realm of comic books. I don’t know what it is, but they seem like a genre all to themselves. I never saw any other comics like them and these are universally loved throughout the world. Asterix & Obelix stands out more because of the Roman history sprinkled throughout. The stories were great jumping off points to learning more about real figures like Cesar, and Cleopatra.
Asterix & Obelix XXL 2 is a remaster of the PS2 game Asterix & Obelix XXL 2: Mission: Las Vegum (2005). I had always been thinking of jumping onto the Asterix games on PSN. Now seems like the time as they’ve ported them to the PlayStation 5. There are five games now available. I jumped into the second one knowing the characters, so I wasn’t worried about missing story beats. The narrative is simple, but you really don’t get a sense of who these characters are if you jump into this game without knowledge of the franchise. The story is about Getafix the village druid, gathering the other three druids so Cesar can kidnap them. The question for Asterix and Obelix is why did their friend Getafix do such a traitorous thing. So on their journey to confront him they save the other druids. The story is simply more or less simply to give you a reason to traverse the world. Originally being a PS2 game makes that not surprising as the platformers of the time were more about the gameplay with barebones story, think of Jak and Daxter.
The gameplay is like I said akin to Jak and Daxter, an action-adventure platformer. The world of Las Vegum is separated into six levels that you can fast travel between. Like the Asterix comics Asterix and Obelix face battalions of Roman soldiers. There are a ton of these battles, almost too many. There are power ups and upgrades that you can work towards making your battles faster and more thrilling by the end. While there are new enemy types with each new level the onslaught of enemies becomes annoying when exploring the game. The thing that really saves this game is the parodies, and if I played it back on PS2 it would have been one of my favourite games of that generation.
Jumping into this game I was expecting an Asterix game, not an Asterix looking game with more parodies than I could imagine. The first enemy type I encountered was jarring because it was a Roman soldier dressed as Mario, specifically Mario from Super Mario Sunshine, decked out with the water gun. Every enemy type parodies another game. You even have Roman soldiers dressed as Sonic, as Rayman, as Pac-Man. Some levels have sections that are clearly made to look like Donkey Kong, like Space Invaders. This game was a massive treat and had me laughing at the absurdity of what I would come across next. I started writing a list of them as I came across them and I couldn’t keep up. One of the final bosses even parodies the Agent Smith battles in The Matrix. Honestly, I’m unsure of how they got away with doing all these parodies, but I loved it.
There are a few things that stop this game from being great in 2023. Firstly the cutscenes are all ripped from the PS2 game. They even show the cutscenes at two-thirds of the screen so it doesn’t look even worse if it was stretched out. There aren’t enough cut-scenes to be a major problem, but you wonder why they didn’t just remake them. The biggest problem which may be addressed in an update is how the game runs on this PS5 version. It stutters like it is running at twenty frames at times. Surprisingly the hard drive space of the game is one third of the PS4 version. So that shows they’ve obviously utilised the game for the PlayStation 5 because there are plenty of instances where games are exactly the same size like they’ve just thrown it onto the store under the PS5 banner.
Overall, this is a fun game from the past. As long as you know what you’re in for you will enjoy your time. It’s longer than I thought but not long enough to take you more than a few game sessions to complete. This game is a free upgrade for the PS4 version and that version is on sale often if you are worried about jumping in at full price. Available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
Are you a fan, or have you played any Asterix & Obelix games?
Robert Ring
KissTheGames 