Asterix & Obelix XXL 3 - The Crystal Menhir

I've waited 2 months for the developers to fix a problem, that myself and some others experienced. Constant stuttering, hiccups, that made the game unplayable. I played in 4K resolution with a i7-6700, 16GB Ram and a geforce gtx 1080ti... and the strange thing: one time, I could play the game absolutely fluently, no performance issues nothing, just smoothly with 50fps. I would have continued, if I knew, this were the only 20 minutes, I would enjoy the game. Countless restarts rendered me desperate... I contacted Microids and Osome. The admitted the issue being that huge, it could aparently not being fixed that quickly. Now, two months since release, still no sign of an update made me run out of patience. The game seemd a lot of fun during that 20 minutes I could get a glimpse at it. But for the fact, that there is still no fix, I give 1 Star for the customer treatment.

Great things in this game : - The animations. Overall they are great and feel pleasant to look at. - The french version. As a french person, I played with the french version on. The acting was awesome (I believe they hired the cartoon official voice actors). Also there are some neat references that made laugh/chuckle. Definetely a must have if you are french. Average things in this game : - The story. As a lot of games, the story starts off great and then becomes boringly long and it feels like the game is dragging you between points to get the average play time to be higher. - The graphics. Honestly the cartoony look in this game is well done. Even though I beleive the graphics are great, it is in the "average" section because someone's reaction to graphics in a video game is subjective and can't be accounted for a great or a bad point (unless it is very bad/glitchy). Bad things in this game : -Pretty much everything else, but I will detail my main issues with the game below. -The gameplay. It is boring and bad. Hitting the ennemies doesn't feel great, the skills feel average if not mediocre or useless, the "powers" are only really useful when doing puzzles, as they are hard to actually use in battle and my biggest complain is the magic potion as it doesn't feel like it makes you powerful at all, which is a shame in my opinion. The shielded ennemies are a pain to fight without using skills (which are limited unless you abuse one skill over and over again, making the gameplay loop boring). - The bugs. The game crashed a few times (but it felt like a lot in my ~9 hours of playing). I sometimes got softlocked as characters got stuck in terrain (which felt like a pain in the bun as the game works with checkpoints, making me restart a puzzle sometimes). Finally the audio lines sometimes not working at all. - The cutscenes. They are long and slow and rendered in the game engine, which led the characters to sometimes get stuck in terrain, making it a pain to look at.

I love XXL2 but when I played XXL3 I noticed one thing: it was really different from the previous one. Not in a bad way (the ambient puzzles are great, combat system is not fun like the previous game because there are no combos) just really different. XXL3 is not just a fun game, it has also the same feeling of the old cartoon and comics of Asterix&Obelix (even more than the previous XXL2 game) and it's also really challenging. There are many thing that could be improved in this game but I think that, for a small game with a small budget this is a good result.

So the reason for me to put such a low rating on this game is first of all, they butchered the asterix franchise which was carefully stone by stone built by ELB studio that sadly doesn't exist anymore for a decade already. This game is the greatest representation of word "boring", it's extremely boring and not satisfying to play it at all. They took all the XXL and XXL2 fundamentals of game design and threw it in a garbage can, completely destroying a working game design of first XXL entries. Cancerous looking plastic graphics, very bad and confusing level design, horribly implemented game mechanics that basically dont work not only in game but also in Asterix universe itself. And second of all today was announced a "new" Asterix game called ASTERIX AND OBELIX XXXL: THE RAM FROM HIBERNIA This pile of crap made me come here and alarm people to not support under any circumstances these developers. They do not deserve even a broken cent. They rolled out such horrible copy pasted product that its painful to even watch it. They reused entirely 95% of assets from XXL3 and are trying to sell it as a standalone game. I will write a detailed review when the game comes out at the Fall or 2022. Bad and lazy developers must not be tolerated. When they release crap and people eat it, that is a solid ground for them to not even try at all to meet any quality because, well you gonna eat it anyways, and milk your money and play with your feelings by using nostalgic memories of yours.