Sabre Wulf couldn’t be more Rare, yet it seems to get overlooked. Its lush environments are almost DKC-esque, the music by Robin Beanland reminds me of Starfox Adventures, and the lewd jokes and silly characters are right out of Tooie or Ghoulies. Thanks Leigh. Of course coming from the handheld team there’s a slight roughness about it (and the occasional use of Comic Sans), but it’s also got charm in spades, and deserves to be mentioned towards the end of the same breath as all these other games.

The game picks up Sabreman’s story thread and design from Banjo-Tooie: he’s older, with a killer stache, looking back on his Spectrum-era adventures fondly. But the events of the first game catch up with him as the Wulf comes back with a vengeance, aided by a new baddie, the evil scientist Dr Dolittle-Goode. Don’t expect any kind of final confrontation with either of these two, by the way. Sabreman roams around an interconnected isometric hub world, getting quests from villagers and retrieving stolen items and treasures from Wulf lairs that pop up all over the map.

Inside each of these lairs is a side-on level. Sabreman has to traverse various obstacles and enemies to sneak the treasure away from the sleeping Wulf. He has the help of a range of creatures to get there; a limited inventory of many bizarre monsters are used depending on the situation: as platforming aids, or as weapons to remove enemies. Your stock is reset each level, and the available types can be expanded by finding them hidden in the levels, or buying them at the shop. Every level plays out the same, but the complexity ramps up steadily as your creature types expand and the placement of enemies becomes more dastardly, so by the end it becomes something of a sandbox as each step you advance brings a fresh challenge, not to mention that many levels have multiple paths. This puzzley freedom makes for fun gameplay, and there’s an additional element of speed getting you a better reward.

The moment you take a treasure, the game transforms into a different kind of fun. Sabrewulf’s howl eliminates all friendly and hostile creatures, and it becomes a madcap dash back to the safety of your tent, dodging and kiting the Wulf at your heels in a straight platforming race. The exceptions to this formula are the bonus levels, in which you bumble around the Wulf in a small arena, and the laboratories which are a race to the top against a strict time limit with different kinds of obstacles.

The use of creatures as tools is a unique element that makes the game much more than a simple platformer. The hub areas too add character and context, as you chase the bad guys to each new area. I should mention that each area is named for an Ultimate (pre-Rare) game from the 80s; this is in addition to a plethora of other references to their old titles. Cookie the shopkeeper, the unseen sailor’s boat called Mire Mare, a statue in the town hall of the devil monster (!) from Underwurlde, etc. The handheld team also snuck in their requisite Rare Cow, of course! There’s plenty of new silliness in addition to the referential stuff though, with quaint Britishisms liberally scattered throughout. I haven’t seen any other games with a tea-sculling minigame, for example.

This is one of Rare’s post-Microsoft buyout GBA games, published by THQ. In this period, several of these games were ported to java phones. Kaolink handled the Sabre Wulf port, and delivered a competent approximation of the game. Sure it only has 3 worlds with 5 levels, instead of 8 with 7, only 3 creatures instead of 15, and only 6 amulet pieces hidden in normal levels, instead of 8 in the climactic world-ending labs. And it has no sound after the short title screen ditty, and there’s much less complex combat and interactions, and they misspell Wulf as “wolf”. But for the limitations of the platform it’s decent enough, and it looks good.

I was really sucked into this game; finding secrets, helping the sometimes daft NPCs, discovering each new innuendo in dialogue, and trying out different creatures for the varied challenges in levels. It fits perfectly into Rare’s oeuvre of cartoonish games. You have to somewhat look past the typical GBA fuzzy soundfonts and bright, messy graphics but inside is the beating heart of Rare. I wrote about this game and others in the Sabreman series for DKVine’s Honourable Mentions feature, and I couldn’t be happier to finally experience it for myself. Splendiferous! Gently, Bentley! For the Empire, wot!