300: March To Glory Review

With marauding armies, heroic underdogs, brutal combat and gore-soaked battlefields, 300 is the perfect blueprint for a bloodthirsty combat game.

But while the developers were gifted with all the ingredients for a masterful adventure, they’ve spectacularly failed to capture the spirit, intensity or epic sweep of Zack Snyder’s stirring flick.

A thinly disguised Dynasty Warriors rip-off, March For Glory is a painfully dull hack-and-slasher where players are tasked with pounding the attack button until every slavering Persian has been dismembered. But while the battles in Dynasty Warriors were brought to life by hundreds of warriors that gave each battle a bewildering sense of scale, the number of fighters in this PSP brawler is limited to around 20 at a time, failing to capture the astonishing scope of Snyder’s big screen skirmishes.

While there’s some fun to be had in relentlessly hacking the heads off anonymous rivals, March To Glory’s pace is often interrupted by pointless set-pieces that add little to the experience; locking shields with your colleagues to form a phalanx is a cheap way to defeat powerful enemies as you can cower behind a line of steel and poke rivals with a spear, while the occasional stealth sections are intensely frustrating as off-screen enemies can spot you and alert their friends to your sneaky presence.

Essentially, March For Glory fails to deliver the depth a modern slash-’em-up demands, and even the game’s one saving grace - the murderous ‘blood drunk’ moments where your hero turns into an unruly berserker - is poorly considered and implemented. Even if you’re a hardcore fan of Frank Miller’s inky masterpieces, this lazy, rushed spin-off will leave you cold.