Beowulf: The Game Critic Reviews

Beowulf: The Game had an opportunity to be a standout movie licensed game. Unfortunately the glitching just made it looks sloppy and in need of work. I enjoyed a lot of the fighting elements they introduced here, and the development team deserves a pat on the back for that.

Beowulf lives up to its "M" rating, and there's plenty of hacking and slashing to be done here. But if you're looking for more than just bloody waterfalls and severed arms, you'll have to look elsewhere.

What it lacks in polish it makes up for in diversity and brutality. This is one bloody game.

There's nothing broken here, but combat lacks flair and strategy is insignificant.

There's much to enjoy and Ubisoft does incorporate one or two nifty ideas. Sadly, though, we've seen it all before.

If you liked what you saw at the theater and need a way to blow off a few hours then it's a perfect weekend rental. But it doesn't live up to the epic nature the classic poem and it certainly isn't going to make you forget about God of War III either.

The button-pounding boss showdowns are challenging, and cutting a gory swathe through goons with the help of a half-dozen dim Thanes is crude fun, but you're likely to regret the expense than sing Beowulf's praises at the end of its eight hours.

There’s some gruesome battling here, but nothing that’ll push you all that hard.

In this day and age, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a game based on a movie fares poorly, but for a character who has survived since 700AD, he deserves better treatment than this.

You can blast through the game on the lower difficulty in less than day. You will notice the title says: Beowulf: The Game. That's to distinguish it from the ancient manuscript. I tend to think of it as a disclaimer, or quite possibly a warning.

Even with the support of the upcoming feature film (which supposedly donated art assets), it still manages to oscillate between looking positively stunning to heinously ugly.

It's just run-of-the-mill game design. Bar the occasionally impressive combat, Beowulf doesn't have enough to make it stand out.

Even a merry band of adventurous thanes can't save this quest from ruin.

A rehash of other games that did the job of melding great storytelling with original combat elements much better. This was a game which was greeted with high expectations, only to have those dashed.

A fairly standard game in a genre overflowing with quality.

Indeed, you could go so far as to say that it's old news, a little tedious, and there are countless other, better things around right now that improve on it in so many ways.

Thanks to its ability to maul the movie that it supposedly follows, Beowulf is a poor substitute for the film and an even more frustrating experience on the console, given its clumsy fight mechanics, uninspired enemies and the repetitive button-mashing.

Destined to line bargain bin bottoms. It has its hacking and slashing moments, but like so many movie-licensed titles, it reeks of a truncated production schedule and a too-heavy reliance on a story intended for another medium.

Ubisoft Shanghai and Tiwak did a magnificent job of butchering the reimagining of a classic tale and providing plenty of disposable, derivative gameplay to go along with it.

The presentation isn't bad and the rhythm mini-games are neat, but overall, Beowulf crumbles under his own dead weight.