Pushover

For my second game, I picked one I’ve never played before; I vaguely remember reading about it at the time, but it held no appeal for me back then. In the interests of science I thought I’d give it a go!

Ant, Quavers, and dog

The basic gist seems to be that you’re an ant and you need to knock over some dominoes, and if you knock them over in the correct order the door to the next level opens. Some dominoes have special properties, such as jumping up in the air and running on the underside of platforms or creating a bridge across a gap, and the challenge is to arrange the dominoes correctly, start them toppling, then head for the exit to be there when it opens. Why you’re an ant is uncertain, what relevance the dominoes have in your ant world is puzzling, and the game seems to have some connection with Quavers: they get a mention on the title screen, and after completing level 10 I apparently found a packet and met up with some sort of dog (who presumably was the Quavers mascot at the time).  (Update: turns out there’s another Quavers-related game, One Step Beyond, which I’ve added to The Queue.)

Goes from this...

Anyway, on to the review. With no instructions or even the first idea what the game would entail beyond pushing something over the game was a bit baffling at first, but once I made a few random moves and realised that pressing space shows up a description of the various dominoes it got a little clearer and the first dozen levels passed by without a hitch. If anything they were too easy, most requiring moving only one domino, so when the complexity took a sudden jump I was ill prepared and became completely stuck.

Having noticed that some of the level codes seemed to be related to others — for instance the code for level two is 01536, and level four is the same value multiplied by two, i.e 03072; ditto level five (03584) and eleven (07168) — I tried a few multiples of other codes and managed to skip ahead a bit, but found that much of the rest of the game suffered from the levels being either far too easy or frustratingly difficult. Perhaps that was just my ineptitude, but not long after my required hour I abandoned it; a pity, really, as the execution was quite nice but I just wasn’t having any fun.

...to this in a flash.

On the whole I’m not a huge fan of puzzle games, and my patience with them is limited at the best of times. The arbitrary jump in difficulty with this meant that I hadn’t really had a smooth transition from levels that were there more to demonstrate what the various dominoes did than to actually provide a puzzle to those that were bona-fide puzzles, and when they did start requiring thought there was no transition; it was like someone explaining to me what a scalpel is then sending me off to perform open heart surgery.

On the other hand, perhaps I’m just stupid…

• Graphics: Functional but well animated; for most of the time the only thing moving onscreen is your ant, but when the dominoes get going they’re fairly convincing. By no means ugly, anyway.
• Sound: Faintly irritating, and levels are over within a minute or so at which point the music changes briefly then returns to the in-game music, and the constant stop-start meant the music got turned off after 15 minutes. As to the sound effects, dominoes falling over are hardly a sonic spectacular.
• Gameplay: Personally I didn’t like it; the learning curve was far too steep, the controls were a bit fiddly, and when my hour was up I was quite happy to abandon it. The control issue aside, though, if you like puzzle games this is a novel twist.
• Amiga annoyances: One disk, so no swapping problems. Could well be an ST port as the graphics and sounds are unspectacular.

Overall verdict: more a flop than a pushover.

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