ZX Computing
1st June 1985Stay Kool
Chuckie Egg 2 managed to add a couple of new features to the standard platform format, but Stay Kool is about as unoriginal an addition to the hordes of Jet Set Willy clones as you can get. In fact, you could even say that it's more of a Manic Miner clone than of the more modern Jet Set Willy. There is one room in Stay Kool that is more or less a straight copy of one in Manic Miner (I think it was called Return Of The Kong Beast, or something like that).
Even the graphics are a step backwards, for although the various 'monster' sprites are animated adequately the figure of Luke Warm (the hero of the piece) is pretty slow moving, and very flickery.
The plot of the game, such as it is, is that Luke's spaceship has been damaged in a battle and that Luke, in order to launch his escape pod must rush around the ship collecting fuel pods before the ship overheats. The logic of all this seems pretty dubious when you actually see the sort of rooms that the ship contains, but what the heck, it's only a game.
Most of the rooms are quite well designed, being hard enough to require a bit of thought, but not so hard that you die instantly. And, as in Jet Set Willy, you don't have to collect the objects in each room before moving on to the next, so if an object seems too hard to reach you can carry on exploring and come back later. And, as a matter of fact, I did find the game interesting enough to want to carry on wandering through the rooms. Despite the simplicity of the game, it is well enough designed to hold my attention. In fact, it's not a bad game at all really, it's just that it's so clone-like that I can't really get very excited about it. If it were a budget game, say £1.99/£2.50, it would be excellent value, but for £6.95 it's not top of my shopping list.