Gauntlet - Preview @ Eurogamer

Eurogamer posted a short preview for the new Gauntlet based on a short demo they plated from the games developer Arrowhead Studios.

It's astonishing to play the new Gauntlet and see how wordlessly a team learns to operate together, sending out a few treasure collectors while others shoot from a distance. Beyond that, keys and locks and spawners return. There are never enough keys for all the locks, making for tricky choices, and there's always someone who forgets to head straight for the spawner and lets the room fill with monsters. Sorry about that.

All of this is great, and it's nice to see that Arrowhead's still really working to nail the details - the argument du jour revolves around how friendly fire should work, with the current solution suggesting it should only be turned on for Relics, equippable weapons that you pick up in the dungeons. As far as I'm concerned, though, the thing that makes Gauntlet such an exciting prospect now is the thing that made it such an exciting prospect back in the 1980s: Arrowhead has nailed the skeletal crunch of combat - that magical moment at which blade meets baddie and you feel amazing. This is the heart of Gauntlet. Good to have it back again.