Overall 6.1 Graphics 4 Sound 2 Addictive 2 Story 3 Depth 2 Difficulty 8
4.5
Athena is no Goddess on NES Ghostbear1111
Athena is a platform side-scroller from SNK and produced in 1986. I discovered it while reading an article about the Top 10 Worst Games for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
First and foremost, this is a poorly designed games. Different elements, from gameplay to graphics to controls to story and sound, are all weakly done and leave something to be desired.
The story revolves around Athena, Greek Goddess of Wisdom, art, and strategic warfare. She is bored living in the heavens and she decides to descend to have some adventures. She goes the Door Which Shouldn't Be Opened in the basement of the castle and tumbles to the world below. While falling, she ends up nearly naked, unarmed, and in a land where everything wants to kill her. She has to battle through countless enemies to find her way back home.
That sounds like a great plot and it would make a good story. Unfortunately, the game itself is poorly executed.
Athena starts out with nothing more than underwear and boots. Her first ability is to kick enemies. When enemies are defeated, they sometimes drop weapons, including sticks, hammers, swords, a bolo-type weapon, bows and arrows, and more. Athena can also pick up armor, including helmets, shields, and plate armor. These are found by destroying boulders and rocks throughout the game. Athena can even find the Wings of Hermes (or something like that) which enable her to jump extra high. She climbs, jumps, and fights through an uninteresting background, through a world like a forest, an unwater level, and more.
The graphics leave something to be desired and I wasn't sure what I was even fighting. There were what looked like horse-head soldiers but I wasn't sure what they represented. There were other enemies but they, too, were unidentifiable. All I knew was anything that moved had to be killed. The slaughter was spectacular and there were constant enemies at every corner. The difficulty, once the screen started filling with bad guys, reminded me of how much action happened in Ghost & Goblins. Athena is extremely hard from the standpoint of any number of enemies attacking while mobility, short-range weapons, and bad control helped to kill the player.
Sometimes it seemed like I would hit enemies but they kept coming. And sometimes Athena jumped ultra-high and sometimes she didn't. It didn't seem to matter how I pressed the button.
The plot would be good if the game were better. It's frustrating because the controls are weak, the art and design is not engaging, and the game quickly becomes repetitive. Try it to check off "One of the Worst Games Ever" and be prepared to enjoy the first five or ten minutes, then go do something else.
Graphics 4 Sound 2 Addictive 2 Story 3 Depth 2 Difficulty 8
Review Rating: 4.7/5
Submitted: 04-09-17
Review Replies: 2
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