Okay, cards
on the table.
I'm a big fan of
Cosgrove Hall
animation and of
Count Duckula in particular.
(Somehow I knew you were going to say that.
Ed) On the whole the crazy scripts are very
funny indeed, and although the animation is
horribly limited, Duckula's to-camera looks are
great.
The first Duckula outing,
No Sax Please
We're Egyptian, was a respectable platform
game with an extremely silly cheat mode
(the Count turned into a bottle of banana
milk, or something), and this sequel lifts
its snappy plot straight from one of the
shows (Duckula gets marooned on the
Planet Cute and has to avoid the teddies
and fluffy bunnies and escape back to dear
old dreary Transylvania) so it comes as a
hope-dashing disappointment that
Duckula 2 is
such a dreadful game. Once again, platforms
are the order of the day, with the Count
advancing through single-screen levels, his
task simply to get from the left of the screen to
the right. To make life as tricky as possible,
cute baddies (or goodies, or whatever)
patrol the platforms, which themselves
have a witty habit of disappearing. As
Duckula is armed with a ketchup gun,
gameplay consists of avoiding or
shooting the cuties and waiting for a
platform to appear in front of you so you can
get that bit nearer to the exit. This game has
no redeeming qualities whatsoever. As only
one platform is within reach at
a time, you simply stand
there and wait for either
(a) another one to
appear so you can jump
onto it, or (b) the one
you're standing on to
disappear, dropping you
fatally to the ground. (Whereupon
you have to leave the room and
come back in, because the game
doesn't reset the platforms.)
Dodging cuties is no better - you
either squirt them (until your ammo runs
out) or, erm, get killed by them. The whole
thing seems to play quite happily by itself, with
the player being a sort of novelty bonus. The
Count is doing himself no favours at all by
endorsing this very sad,
can't-believe-it-wasn't-written-in-1982 game. Saying this is aimed at
younger players is no excuse. What
makes Alternative think they can
get away with giving younger
players such a rubbish game?
[One of the "Ones That Got Away" reviews --NickH]
| Ratings given by other magazines |
| |
6/10
| |
|
| Info supplied by the SPOT*ON database |
