I waited with anticipation as this game downloaded onto my Xbox hard drive, and initially I was in a state of bliss. I remember Rainbow Islands from when I was but a little lad, it was a fun, imaginative adventure which was for all intents and purposes a sequel to Bubble Bobble but with rainbows to fire out instead of bubbles.
Now as you would probably guess, I was expecting more of the same and for all intents and purposes that’s what I got. The game was a graphically enhanced version of the original with one major difference, you have to climb your way up a huge tower filled with enemies. Now this in itself has been done a plethora of times before in a number of ways, but this game seemed to have done it right. I mean it starts off like a retro platformers dream come true until you see the tiny, well not really that tiny, flaws. As you progress through the game enjoying the upbeat pop track you may notice that the penalties for even so much as touching an enemy will knock 30 seconds from your allotted time. This can be rectified however by collecting crystals that are dropped by said enemies, however until you become more versed in the dynamics of the game you will find that you can only collect measly 1 second time bonuses that take you twice as long to collect, this kind of renders them pointless. You do get 5 and 10 second bonus crystals as you start to rack up multiplier kills, but if you set a foot wrong you will find it a wasted endevour as you get 30 seconds knocked from your time limit again and again.
Now a game that I assume is meant to be primarily aimed at kids should not be as frustrating as this game is. There is no option to change the difficulty level and controls are fixed, and that pop tune I mentioned earlier, well trust me you will be turning the volume down before you even play through 15 minutes of the game as the music never changes, it’s the same tune on a loop over and over again. Back to frustration. A game like this should have more checkpoints. I mean you work your way through a level and get hit one too many times and end up all the way back at the beginning of said level, there is no halfway points in this game, it’s all or nothing. There is no save feature either so if you have to stop for dinner, or there is an unfortunate power cut, you cannot continue your game where you left off, you have to start at the beginning of the story mode all over again including sitting through the intro.
Onto modes now. The game has 4 distinct modes which unfortunately do not alter the game in any way. The levels are exactly the same no matter which mode you choose. The only difference is that you can choose a variety of costumes including your own avatar. This gives the game a little bit of a boost as it’s quite funny to see the painstakingly created mini you leaping from platform to platform. This soon becomes old though. As with the (shudder) Warriors game, I couldn’t try the multiplayer section as no one appeared to be online. I found this disappointing as I’m sure the game would be more fun as a multiplayer rather than a single player affair.
I think this game could be fun in short bursts if there was a save option included, but as it is it’s a little disappointing.
VideogameUK verdict: 4/10
