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Trolls

aka: Oscar in Toyland
Moby ID: 6522

Amiga version

A collection of nice touches, desperately searching for a surrounding game

The Good
It looks quite pretty, with much nicer backdrops than the PC version, and has a certain cuteness.

The level designs are unusual and imaginative, the newspaper level with the headlines in the background (my favourites include 'Mirukl cyure four disleksyer' and 'Freda Scar ate my pay'), the level built around pencils, rulers and desks, and the enemies including jumping lamps which fire electrical bolts at you.

Some of the character is superb, especially the 'surprised elephant' restart point and the pigstop at the end of the level.

The Bad
The gameplay is quite lacking in focus at times, with the level designs sprawling, the direction to progress in being very unclear, and often short on baddies. When you lose lives, it's often because you can't see things coming at you, or it's too difficult to position around static enemies that you have to hit at the right angle to kill.

Although it's a neat idea, the whole bonus/bogus thing is a little unforgiving, because it's so easily to accidentally collect the G as you try to avoid a nasty or collect something else.

Those balloons containing goodies are decidedly uninteresting, and just waste your time.

The Bottom Line
A platform game with some neat touches, but essentially weighed down by some inherent design problems the cartoony touches can't fix. Suffers from similar problems to Assassin and Zool, so if you liked those you may go for this.

by Martin Smith (81666) on March 21, 2004

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