Hunt out that jangly jester’s hat you bought at a festival and get bouncing with the latest version of the jolly platformer, Pandemonium. This port of the Eidos ‘classic’ is faithful almost down to the last pixel, from a slightly grainy version of the intro screens down to jester Fargus’s Converse high tops (Really? In 2009?).
For anyone who didn’t own a PlayStation or a Sega Saturn (yes, it’s that old), Pandemonium is a straightforward 2D platformer wrapped in a good-looking 3D harlequin costume.
You walk, run and bounce your way through various fantasy worlds, collecting coins and killing monsters on your quest to stuff a big, bad magical monster back into its own dimension. You can occasionally swap characters between the jester and Nikki, a saucy sorceress, but aside from that and some mild power-ups there’s little variety in the repetitive run-and-jump gameplay.
Action is smooth, responsive and well rendered, especially when you’re flying through the air, and the 3D backgrounds look great in the N-gage engine. On our early preview version, the A & B buttons didn’t work in landscape mode, although portrait gaming was fine. Sound effects are limited to a boinging noise as you jump, grumblings from monsters and ambient sound effects (for example, from waterfalls), although you can listen to your own MP3s while you play.
Pandemonium isn’t a bad game, by any means. It offers some decent challenges and is always easy on the eye. But time rolls on and, frankly, Pandemonium hasn’t. Even a version released for the original N-gage platform way back in 2003 had a basic multiplayer mode, whereas the 2009 version has nothing more than online rankings to strive for.
A passable retro port, then, but Eidos has really missed an opportunity to deliver an updated platformer - excuse the pun - with bells on.
Details
Price: £6
Rating: 7+
Size: 20MB
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