Personally, the game IS fun despite it's flaws and very short length per run, but it takes a good bit of getting used to the system. I first brought it years ago after playing the original Age of Barbarians but mostly put it down because I couldn't get used to it at the time, but with Chronicles just releasing, I decided to play a bit more of it and have gotten decently good at it, completing it several times over with different characters.

It plays A LOT like a classic arcade cabinet fighting game, you get a series of fights with either corridors of traps or other short minigame segments between them. You have two lives and each death afterwards deducts 10 minutes form the total 60 minutes timer. There's no saving between fights so if you lose a run, you need to start again from the begining. A run overall though shouldn't take you any longer than maybe 20 or so minutes so your timer does give you a fair few extra lives if you need them.

The fights against human enemies are, for the most part all pretty good, the lower points of the game tend to the segments where you fight beasts are a bit more janky and one boss in particular beast that you MUST face in order to get the desired 'good' ending is just straight up terrible and needs a bit of exploiting of the running-jump attack to beat, while the final boss is fairly trivial once you figure out his routine.


Everything follows a fairly linear format, 2 fights against non-playable humanoids, one against a playable humanoid, a fight against beasts, and then the endgame with a very short dungeon similar to the first game and the final boss himself.

Each character has a different ending, some a bit more raunchier than others.

While I do enjoy it myself, my negative recommendation is PURELY due to the fact the game crashes incessantly, especially with certain characters. I don't remember having a single crash with the DLC characters, She-Red or Deathbringer, but with a few specific characters, in my experience particularly Xula and Radhaan it's near constant. Completing a run with those is almost impossible without experiencing a random crash nearly every attempt.