When this arrived in the office, memories of Golden Axe started flooding in. It was quite a surprise, then, to see that this 128-bit effort couldn't better it...
Mark Eveleigh

In the days of the MegaDrive and SNES wars there were a number of killer apps that each machine had to combat the other, one of the strongest of which being a two-player arcade conversion of Golden Axe. This beat-'em-up was extremely playable in its fantasy world and provoked many an hour of mortal combat on Sega's machine.

That was back in the days of 16-bit consoles built like bricks and sounding like MIDI synthesisers of the '70s. With the dawn of the Dreamcast, gamers have entered into a wonderful CD-quality sounding, 3D world of 128-bit to be gifted with... Soul Fighter.

This is a game that you can pick up and play straight away, very much like Golden Axe - but with one, rather surprising, flaw - there is no multi-player option. It could be one of those games that has you sitting down with three of your mates smashing up bad guys like there's no tomorrow, but instead creates a repetitive, linear environment. The gameplay consists of you walking for a bit, fighting for a bit, walking for a bit more, fighting a bit more and so on.

As you walk (very slowly) through the levels and encounter enemies, you remain almost invulnerable as a result of each and every enemy giving you a health power-up on death. Not only do enemies rarely get the opportunity to hit you, but they also totally re-charge your health until you find some more enemies for a battering!