Previous Next

It's cringe time again. Another ecologically friendly, let's save the rainforests and throw our arms around the world game, like the ridiculous Captain Planet. This one's got a hardcore (you know the score) deep, acid rave house soundtrack which sounds remarkably like most other deep acid house rave "songs".

Briefly explained, this is a platform game featuring what looks like a hastily-drawn Chinese doll with a huge head and very little in the way of body. This crap and nameless sprite is supposed to make its way through four worlds - the rainforest, Metal City, the Temple and the MindScape - beating the baddies by chucking love hearts at them (barf!) and collecting all the nice, fluffy and good bonus items like big sticky cakes and fruit. Jeez.

The rest of the graphics are pretty awful too. Possibly the object was to make them look wacky, funky and carefree, but unfortunately they come out looking tacky, funny and definitely free of care. The backgrounds clash so much with the foreground (is it a foreground?) you can't really see what's going on.

If you're fortunate enough to own an STE, you get to hear the obnoxiously stupid sampled sound effects the crap sprite gives out, but on a normal ST you don't get any music and only standard chip noise. And you can guess what that's like without too much difficulty.

Hex have tried hard to make a game that's fun, young, trendy and interesting to play, and failed distinctly on all counts. It's vaguely like a Jeff Minter game in some ways, but tragically in no good ways. It's a good touch to enable you get at the sprites so you can edit them, putting no copy protection on the disk, and printing the manual on recycled paper, and so on, but it doesn't make up for a crap game.

If "environmental" games carry on in this way, people will be wondering whether doing the world in isn't such a bad idea after all. Nice title, shame about everything else.

1. Crazed graphics make it look like a Commodore 64 game. Sound effects are so weird they're not funny. Gameplay is boring. But don't get the impression that it's a bad game... oh, all right, it is.