I hate to be so negative about a game I remember fondly from my childhood, but this is simply not very good. You might still want to buy it if you have nostalgic feelings about the original, but do so as an act of games preservation, not because you expect a great gaming experience.
The remake is fine on a technical level. You can choose from three levels of widescreen zoom, all the way from original 1992 size-Zool where you have no chance to see what’s coming up as the screen starts scrolling, to a modern zoom level that really utilises the fact that modern screens are wide and high resolution. There’s also an optional CRT-filter to mimic what the game might have looked like on a not super great CRT screen back in the day. The game looks fine either way, though, and I’ll always hold that I don’t remember games from this era looking blurry and scan-liney. I remember them being crisp and colourful. The music is catchy, although the tunes are short and loop far too quickly if you’re exploring a level fully. There’s also only one piece per world and four stages per world, so they do start to grate a bit. Of course, if you speedrun the levels, which is probably more fun than looking for rather meaningless secrets, this is a non-issue.
No, the real issue is that the levels and gameplay are just sort of empty feeling. The stage layouts feel haphazard and simplistic, which makes platforming itself, as well as exploration, rather uninspired most of the time, and the enemies just have no variety, mostly just swapping out sprites between the worlds and then remixing a few different variations on how they move. To add insult to injury, interacting with them is not very satisfying either most of the time. The only exception is trying to shoot the drums in the music stages from the front! And this is a problem when the game’s only two modes of engagement are platforming and fighting enemies.
To top it all off, the game is genuinely far too easy. I remember this being extremely difficult and never making it past the third world, if that, when I was nine years old. Now, admittedly, I was nine years old. But even today, I’m not a particularly skilled platform player. I muddle through mostly. But here, I made it to world five without even trying and was never close to getting a game over. (And that’s playing on the original difficulty setting, not the modern setting that gives you a double jump to smooth out the platforming.)
I’m not saying that a game being easy makes it bad in and of itself, but when an action-platformer provides next to no challenge, to the point where you can mostly coast through it and mindlessly jump and shoot without hardly looking at the action in front of your character half the time, we have a fundamental problem with the design of the game.
Again, I’m genuinely sad to have to say this. I’m glad Zool exists in an easily accessible version today, and perhaps people who enjoy chasing high-scores and speedruns will enjoy it more than I did. Perhaps the change to widescreen did something fundamental to the balance of the gameplay, or perhaps Zool was always more about attitude and style than about quality gameplay?
(I also hate that I have to chose recommend/don't recommend. On the one hand, the game is kind of dull to me, on the other hand, I want people who remember the game and want to experience it again to play it).
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