They say first impressions are very important, so when the loading screen appears and is accompanied by a low-quality sample of Ride of the Valkyries that’s looped so badly it sounds like a scratched record, things aren’t looking good. Still, never judge a book, right? Wrong.

The game bears a passing resemblance to Psygnosis’ Barbarian with the icon driven interface, but there the similarity ends. While that game wasn’t the greatest, at least it didn’t have completely random (and terminal) obstructions, disappearing objects and reappearing enemies, repetitive locations, abysmal animation, and a slow and unresponsive control system.

If you choose to ignore the warning and actually play this steaming heap of ordure, here’s how I predict your experience will go:

Go left, fall down hole due to infuriating controls, go left, fall down hole that suddenly appears through a combination of dodgy controls and the fact that, well, it just appears under your feet; go left, get hit by dragon, go left, go left, get hit by dragon a few times, die. Start again, go left, fall down hole again, go left, fall down second hole again, get hit by dragon, go left, go left, get hit by dragon. Repeat until “combat” is mastered. Kill dragon. Spend five minutes trying to pick up key, accidentally move off screen, go back to find key has vanished, swear as dragon attacks again, die. Repeat, finally collect key, go through door, go left, go left, get squashed by falling slab that appears without warning and once activated is inescapable. Remove disk, break into a dozen pieces and flush down the toilet.

• Graphics: Bland, repetitive and poorly animated.
• Sound: Not much in-game sound to speak of, but judging by the appalling intro sample this is a good thing.
• Gameplay: Frustrating; terrible design and dodgy controls combine to make this an exercise in patience and memory if you want to progress anywhere (which you won’t).
• Amiga annoyances: Nothing Amiga-specific, it’s just generally annoying. There is an ST version which got a couple of reasonable reviews so may possibly suck less; as it stands it couldn’t suck more, anyway.

Overall: the worst game, and possibly the worst thing that I’ve ever seen. A big, fat, stinking pile of the foulest excrement.

I could simply review this by saying I got so engrossed in it that I ended up playing for 14 hours straight and going to bed at 9am, but that would be a copout.  I will, however, apologise for the lack of screenshots as I forgot I was meant to be reviewing it and didn’t make any; I’ll add some later, but right now I want to meet my self-imposed deadline otherwise I’ll lose momentum!

Anyway, on with the game.  Now normally, like puzzle games, I have little patience for real-time strategy games and would have spent as little time as possible with The Settlers.  I find they’re generally an exercise in who can remember the most efficient way to amass a large army quickly, and my usual experience is by the time I’ve started laying out a carefully planned city and am just settling in for the long haul the enemy turns up with a bajillion soldiers who defeat the six peasants I’ve managed to amass and the whole thing is over.  There’s no finesse, and I find the whole thing frustrating and pointless.

Settlers takes a totally different approach; no matter how fast you build, combat takes a while to get to and isn’t really the primary objective (and in fact in 14 hours of play I’ve only come close to combat, so I’ll revisit the review when it happens!)  It’s all about building a self-sustaining community, and it happens at a slow enough pace that you can take your time planning without handicapping yourself in the arms race.  In fact careful city design is essential rather than optional; not only do resources have to be gathered, they need to be processed and stored, and thoughtful placement of the buildings can make the difference between success and failure.

The key point to the development of your settlement is that unlike most RTSes your villagers can only travel by road, and pass they resources in a sort of human-chain from one point to another.  A more traditional RTS like Age of Empires allows you to dump mines, farms, blacksmiths, etc., wherever you feel like it — as long as you can produce enough resources to build an army it’s irrelevant whether it makes any sense, and somehow resources magically move from place to place, so providing you produce a resource anyone can use it instantly anywhere else.

Technical details aside, the game looks and sounds great (although on lower end machines you sacrifice a few things) — birds tweet, pigs grunt, and as you [an around the map and different buildings come in to view you can hear their occupants at work.  The characters themselves are small but well animated, and the buildings are similarly well-crafted.  Even when the screen is full of buildings and townsfolk there’s no hint of slowdown, and the only real criticism I can find is that when building a road that passes behind buildings or through trees it’s often hard to tell where it’s going and a lot of trial and error is involved.

Anyway, my deadline approaches and I’ve got many more praises to sing for this game; my only wish is I’d played it sooner – I’ve only started to scratch the surface of the inner complexities of the game such as the ability to prioritise your transport network for different commodities, so I feel I should return to the review at a later date to fill in the blanks.

• Graphics: Cute, and manage to convey a good sense of what’s going on.  Can become cluttered at times.
• Sound: Ambient sound cues let you know who’s on screen without looking, and even after 14 hours the medieval music is still bearable.
• Gameplay: Engrossing but slow-paced.  Not one for adrenaline junkies, definitely.
• Amiga annoyances: Only supports one drive, but has minimal disk-swapping and is hard-disk installable (which I’d recommended doing).

Overall: It’s going to be hard to tear myself away to review something else, or indeed to do anything else!

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.

It’s the kind of story you read in the papers every day: witch, princess, prince, curse, blah blah blah, and now you’re a frog. Make your way through six different worlds performing the usual platform antics — dodging hazards with well-judged leaps, dispatching enemies with the tried and tested method of jumping on their heads, and collecting coins, fruit, gems, and other gewgaws left lying around. (Why people who make evil plots also leave the instrument of their downfall lying around, and why that instrument generally involves lots of some unrelated item is something of a mystery, but it seems to be a fairly regular occurrence.)

Anyway, so far so ordinary, and nothing you’ve not seen a hundred times before, right?

WRONG! While it may not bring any anything new to the genre, what it does it does to perfection; the cartoony graphics are lovingly crafted, the animation of the enemies is fluid and flawless, and when you pick up speed it all moves at a blistering pace without a sign of flicker or slowdown. All the graphical splendour is topped off with a series of jaunty tunes and a wide array of sound effects, and it forms a pleasing audio-visual whole that can hold its head up with pride.

But how does it play? Writing a decent platformer takes more than just making it look pretty; there are lots of subtle elements that need to be balanced, and here Superfrog really excels. Controls are responsive, and your froggy chum seems to have real substance and the sensations of inertia and momentum are almost palpable; before long you’ll find it second nature twisting in mid-air when leaping from platform to platform, and if you miss it’s always because you’re incompetent and not because the controls are bad! It’s also a relief to find there are no leaps of faith — when you jump off a platform you always have a very good idea of where your destination is, whether it’s safe, and indeed that there is actually something to land on. While there are drops that will kill you they’re all clearly marked — granted, you may not be able to stop in time when you’re moving at full tilt, but you never feel cheated or that your death was unfair.  Pixel perfect leaps are also nowhere to be seen; there are plenty of tricky jumps to make, but you’ll never spend several frustrating minutes trying to get right to the edge of one platform in order to make it safely over a gap. Sure, some do require precision, but it’s all about the timing and mid-air maneuvers, and in skilled hands there’s rarely need to stop moving.

The level design is another shining star; each level is large but varied, and it’s easy to navigate your way around without getting lost. There’s the occasional switch to be thrown to open a door later in the level, a platform convention that can often be irritating; by ensuring that if you miss a switch it’s never far from the door, they serve more to get you in to the habit of investigating all the nooks and crannies rather than a pain in the arse that must be endured. Hidden passages also make an appearance, and occasional glimpses of rooms filled with tantalising coins give you a hint that there may be one nearby.

Froooogs iiiiiiin spaaaaaaaaaace...

There are another couple of things worth mentioning before summing up; because the game is so large it’s unlikely you’ll have the time or ability to finish it in one setting, so there’s a level password system.  Just to spice things up a bit, though, you don’t automatically get a password for finishing a level, you have to win it on a fruit machine mini-game; collecting coins and fruits or finishing the level quickly all earn credits, and at the end of the level these can be exchanged for bonus points or gambled, and while it’s not the most exciting mini-game you’ll ever see, it does make a nice breather after a particularly stressful level.  And for a complete change of pace, between worlds 5 and 6 there’s a little shoot-em-up, Project-F (a tribute to Project-X, one of Team 17′s other games which will be the subject of a future review); again, nothing earth shattering, although it still manages to be a lot more fun than some games that are nothing but shoot-em-ups, which speaks not only to the overall quality of this game, but also to some of the appalling dross that gets churned out!

Anyway, I don’t think there’s a lot more that can be said. Maybe one or two Mario installments slightly edge it out, but for me Superfrog remains one of the greatest platformers released on any system.

• Graphics: Awesome.  Could pass for an AGA game, and still stands up well against modern examples.
• Sound: Fits the visuals perfectly.
• Gameplay: One of the few games I’ve played from start to finish more than once; it gets challenging, but never punishing.
• Amiga annoyances: None.  Comes on four disks, and supports four drives, so disk swapping can be avoided entirely.

Overall verdict: If you like platformers, you’ll love this; a must-have for anyone’s collection.