The game I played most this week: Grizzly

Platform Scrolling Action: Grizzly Adventure

The demo for Grizzly sure does have a weird way of installing itself. It comes with a regular installation application that runs on your desktop machine and puts the game on your device. On your device’s Start Menu you get an icon (well, just an empty icon with the Windows logo on it because the real one is apparently missing) that produces an error message when you click on it. You also get the icon in your Programs screen as well, but you can’t click on that one either. What you have to do is navigate to the Grizzly Demo (or just Grizzly, if you buy the full version of the game) and then click on the executable. How goofy! I re-installed the game again just to make sure, but the error persisted. 

The game itself is yet another platform scroller. It’s getting harder to review these platforms scrollers, since so many of them aren’t really that different from each other. Like most of the other ones out there, this one is pretty much a middle of the road effort, with nothing blatantly good or bad about it. Graphics are OK, not bad by any means but not anything that stands out by any means, and you get 30 levels across three different locations. The mechanics are pretty basic: run and jump from platform to platform, grabbing goodies and dealing with bad guys by either avoiding them or hopping on top of them.

One of the limitations of these simpler platform games is that the enemies (in this case, spiders, bees, and a few other monsters) are not very intelligent. In Grizzly, the just bob up and down or fly around in circles perpetually.  It’s much better to have more intelligent enemies who at least will move in a somewhat random pattern to make them seem more organic. As it is, Grizzly as a package isn’t as engaging as it needs to be and feels a bit mechanical, almost like moving around in a machine.

Platform Robot Adventure: Droid: The Beginning

Droid: The Beginning continues the trend of games that are a little slapped together: there’s no back story, really, except some that it’s an alternative to Sudoku (Spiralmile, the developer, also makes a Sudoku game). My description of it is that you’re this little droid that jumps around trying to avoid fire and other droids. The game play drags along rather slowly. The little robot is more like a mechanical frog, since jumping and running are apparently the only two things it can do on my machine. (If you can find any documentation in the game, please let me know. All I could find were options to register the game, play, quit, and adjust the audio.) The game’s description says it offers five different weapons, but I can’t get the robot to fight no matter what I do. Hint: crouching before you jump allows you to reach greater heights.

The game isn’t exactly terrible, and the element of mystery will appeal to some people. The game’s mechanics and interface are solid. I didn’t notice any performance or stability issues indicating that the game might’ve been rushed out the door too early.  Nevertheless, a game like this that’s a bit slapdash just isn’t going to stand out against the competition. How about save game capability? How about some kind of back story to get me interested enough to want to play the game to begin with? How about the ability to remap keys? Just making a platform scroller with a workable graphics engine and competent mechanics isn’t enough anymore: it has to be something that has most, if not all, of the basic features gamers are expecting these days, and it has to differentiate itself in some way. Droid does have a fairly unique idea behind it, but I found that it wasn't quite compelling enough to seriously consider buying.

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Allen Gall's The Week in Games  Copyright © 2007 by Thaddeus Computing Inc.