Golden Axe: The Duel is the third arcade game in the Golden Axe series (after Golden Axe and The Revenge of Death Adder) and is a two-player versus fighting game based on characters from the popular side-scrolling hack and slash games. It was first released into arcades in February 1995.

Being honest, I wasn’t hoping for too much from this game, but was actually pleasantly surprised by it. It’s a decent enough fighting game, with six button joystick controls, plenty of regular and special moves, and some half decent background scaling. Anyone with an interest in the Golden Axe series, or mid-Nineties beat ’em ups, will probably get some mileage out of it.

There are ten playable fighters – Doc, Green, Jamm, Kain Blade, Keel, Milan Flare, Panchos, Zoma, Gillius Thunderhead and Death Adder – each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and style of fighting. In the single-player game the aim is to pick one fighter and defeat the other nine – in succession – to win the fabled Golden Axe.

The imps from Golden Axe appear in this game and, when hit, drop potions (as they usually do in Golden Axe games), and in The Duel – when you collect five potions – you can use a magic power to unleash extra damage. An indicator at the bottom of the screen shows when magic power is available.

While Golden Axe: The Duel is playable and challenging, and does have well-drawn and colourful graphics, it does lack things like combos, interactive scenery and unlockable characters. The scaling effects are a little messy too. This is by no means a bad game, but it’s not particularly great one either. It’s just a reasonably effective 2D fighting game.

The Duel was also ported to the Sega Saturn and released the same year as the arcade game.

More: Golden Axe: The Duel on Wikipedia