I decided to try something that largely went under the radar when it released a couple weeks ago, and it’s Roman Rumble in Las Vegum: Asterix & Obelix XXL 2. And yes, that is the full title. It appears to be a re-release of Asterix & Obelix XXL 2: Mission Las Vegum, though I had some difficulty finding confirmation of that because despite the similarity in titles, nothing online seems to readily admit to this. As far as I’m concerned it should stay under the radar. Nobody needs to play this. I’m just going to come out and say that this is one of the most boring games I’ve ever played – to a point where I actually fell asleep during the prologue and on a few other occasions while actually playing.

So just who are these characters? They’re actually from a French comic called Asterix – if you grew up with Sunday funnies you probably saw it at some point. It takes place in the city of Gaul during 50 BC. Everybody’s name in this apparently has an -ix or a -um at the end of it. It makes things clunky to pronounce, like how Asterix’s dog’s name is “dogmatix”. In this game, their druid friend Getafix has seemingly betrayed their home Julius Caesar, and it’s up to the heroes to find out what happened, and pummel the stuffing out of lots of Romans along the way. This is a trigger warning for any ancient roman citizens watching…you will see your people get punched a lot.

So the game has a style to it that I can appreciate. It’s colorful, the characters all look like they’re from the comics that I’ve seen online, and there’s a ton of gaming references in here that I liked. Romans dressed like Mario, Sam Fisher, Sonic, a really big guy dressed like Lara Croft, parodies like that. Other than punching some fools and watching them comically fly off the screen, it’s not very violent. Despite being colorful, the graphics are really more of a PS2 or PS3 quality game, and that’s not a compliment.

There’s a hub of sorts that you’ll use to get around to various areas in the game, with goals and some platforming along the way. The game wants you to utilize both characters to solve some puzzles, which were not difficult. The problems that I had were more from not knowing where I had to go next, and the way everything resets when you go into an area after exiting it, I got lost several times.

Also a pain in the rear was the camera. It got stuck on walls and doorways so that I was getting lost on top of fighting with a camera that wasn’t letting me see where I was going. Despite being released in 2019, the camera doesn’t lead ahead to show you anything, and doesn’t let you look around with it other than spinning it around the character, so I have to say it again, this game is really frustrating to get around in. So for record, it looks *and* controls like a PS2 game.

The fighting itself is really, really monotonous and simple. You can basically just mash the punch button down for every fight. You’ll go from area to area where you’ll have to fight waves of enemies. In the beginning it’s not so bad because you’ll see a counter of say, 25 enemies that you have to mow down to unlock a door. But when you get to a point where you’re fighting upwards of 100 enemies, it’s just 100 enemies’ worth of pushing the punch button.

The fighting itself is really, really monotonous and simple. You can basically just mash the punch button down for every fight.

And that number skyrockets early on, as if someone on the developer’s team said “hey, I bet they had so much fun beating 25 guys – let’s make the next wave 80 of them!” and since he’s the boss’ idiot cousin who needed a job but shouldn’t be doing anything other than dressing as the statue of liberty and holding a sign pointing to where you can get your taxes filed, they all cringed and agreed. There’s some spots where they want you to use the grab button to fling bad guys into a target to open a door, but other than that you’re just pushing the punch button. I want to point out that once you clear the amount of enemies in these areas, you actually have to walk through the door to trigger the enemies to stop coming, or else you’ll actually just continue to fight enemies. FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.

There’s a combo system but heck if I understood the timing to get these moves to work and when I did, there was no tangible benefit or flash when using them. So, just back to pushing punch. Both Asterix and Obelix play the same, so other than a couple puzzles that utilize their sizes, there’s no reason to switch between them. You can also use their dog, Dogmatix, to fight but every time I hit the button it just made a noise like it didn’t work. And he’s so small on the screen that I couldn’t tell if that was just a noise and that he did actually lunge or bite or whatever. I don’t know, the fighting is just awful. Buying skills doesn’t help flesh out the fighting either. And I didn’t mention this yet but the currency in this game is roman helmets. Why not gold? Or just coins? Why helmets? I don’t normally care about this but it actually takes me out of the game to sit there and wonder how someone can hand over 1000 helmets to buy a piece of meat or an upgrade.

According to Howlongtobeat.com the game’s only supposed to be 8 hours long but honestly I got about halfway through and stopped. I can’t imagine playing through the whole story, much less going back to grind helmets to buy all the extras. It just wasn’t fun. Also who decided on the title? They couldn’t shorten that? It sounds like a wrestling game title. They could’ve called it Asterix & Obelix: Cure for Insomnia or Asterix & Obelix: Just Put Tape On The Punch Button and Go To Bed.

Anyway, stay away from this. Seriously. You want a beat em up? Go buy the Genesis Collection and play Streets of Rage. Then play Streets of Rage 4 when it comes out next year. Then go buy the Arcade 1up cabinet with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Then take your leftover money and put it into a mutual fund. Or buy some fruit at the farmer’s market and make a pie for your friends and family! JUST DO NOT BUY THIS.