Review: Firetop Mountain - The Legends of Kildarn
Ah, platform games. I can't imagine anyone not having gotten hooked on a platform game at some point. Even my parents and my grandparents have been known to jump a few barrels in their time (under duress admittedly). Most people attribute the birth of platform gaming to Nintendo's Donkey Kong in 1981. The first platformer was actually Universal's Space Panic released in 1980. Since then the platform genre has boasted many classic titles like Chuckie Egg, Super Mario Bros, and my personal favourite, Bug Byte's awesome Manic Miner. With the advent of technological advances such as 3D graphics and 32bit processors, the platformer has slowly mutated into games like the imaginatively named Super Mario 64 and Donkey Kong 64. Personally I miss the old school platformers so I snapped up Steve from inoGames offer of a review sample of his new, old school platformer, Firetop Mountain. Can inoGames first release give us a blast from the past? Read on........
Supplier: inoGames
Product: Firetop Mountain - The Legends of Kildarn
Cost: $8.99 (£4.80 Approx)
Supplier Web Site: inoGames Homepage
Supplier Product Web Site: Firetop Mountain
Special thanks as always go out to Steve from inoGames for supplying us with a review copy.
For your delectation all photographs are thumbnails which may be clicked on to load an image.
Installation
Firetop Mountain comes in two parts. A demo with a 10 unique levels and the full game itself. I really like the idea of having the demo as completely different levels to the main game. Excellent value for money.
The installer for Firetop Mountain is a standard installer exe that you run from your PC and install over ActiveSync. The game will run from Main Memory or SD card without issue. Recently Steve has added the option to download just a cab file to install from. This is a welcome addition to the installation options as I personally prefer to install my games from a cab file on an SD card.
I only installed FTM on two WM5 devices, but am reliably informed that it runs equally as well on WM2003SE devices.
Graphics
The platform genre is a little restrictive from a graphic perspective. As I mentioned in the Introduction the trend towards 3D graphics has not been universally welcomed and has only occasionally been successful in this genre. There are titles that increased graphic size and complexity while scrolling the entire screen to accommodate it. Again this was hit and miss at best. With these restrictions in mind, I found the visual aspects of Firetop Mountain very pleasing on the eye. There were a couple of minor annoyances; the black "ready break" outline around the main character and the dodgy "Monkey" like level change screen. Generally though, the graphics are good. I liked the backdrops and the animations on the bad guys were all nice. The main character himself looks like a chubby version of the 80's cartoon character Sport Billy and made me chuckle.......
Sound
I like the sound effects. They fit the genre very well and reminded me of games gone by with the little plinks and plunks. Very retro. Frustratingly you can't turn the sound effects off from the menu like you can with the music. I don't tend to play games on my PPC with sound because I usually play them when I shouldn't be playing anything. You know, at weddings or work or while downloading. This meant I was having to mute the whole device which was a pain.
I thought the music was excellent. It's an atmospheric electro soundtrack that reminded me something like Jean Michel Jarre. Very cool. There are some moody parts of the music that fit the dark dungeon like levels very well.
Unfortunately for me, the sound on Firetop Mountain suffered the same fate as TCPMP does on the Hermes. From startup the sound stutters and clicks so I had to resort to my old trusty XDA2 (running WM5) to listen to it. I'm presuming this is the same compatibility issue with the Samsung chip as with TCPMP in the Hermes so I wouldn't hold it against FTM.
UPDATE: I've been reliably informed that you can counter the sound issues listed above on the Hermes devices by restarting Firetop Mountain.
Gameplay
Anyone having played a platformer before will know the score here. It's the standard run and jump routine passed down through the ages. There's a brief but imaginative storyline based around saving the people of Kildarn from the nefarious Karn. On each level you need to collect all the bags of gold and then leg it, avoiding the nasties, to the exit. All within the allocated time. There is a little twist in the tale whereby as the last gold bag is collected several items of food are scattered about the level. If you gather all items of this regular fruit bowl you get various bonuses like extra lives and a points extravaganza. In the story mode on every 10th level there's one piece of the sacred amulet, three of which are required to finally banish the malevolent Karn. I'll leave it up to you to find out what happens on levels 31 and 32, the last of the story mode levels.
The score mode is slightly different. You use the same levels as the story mode but they appear randomly. The idea is the more levels you complete the shorter the time limit becomes. The aim is basically to collect the gold to increase the time and various bonus items like smart bombs to make life easier or again to increase the score. Score mode, while fun, is not as good as the story mode. It will however give you an excuse to some back to Firetop Mountain occasionally once you've completed the Story mode.
My biggest issue with FTM is the control method. Unfortunately there's not a huge amount inoGames could do about this, but let's face it, PPC's are crap for platformers. Some are more shoddy than others but the Hermes didn't fare well at all. I got a goodly 10 hours of gameplay from FTM's story mode my first time around but could probably have halved this with a decent joystick or keyboard. InoGames have attempted a work around for this by having the ability to tap Billy with the stylus to make him jump. This didn't work for me personally but it's a quite innovative approach and may work for you. You can reassign any of the control keys through the menu system but I ended up using the standard d-pad and soft button combo. I'd like to have been able to play FTM in landscape mode with the keyboard enabled. This is how I play my Manic Miner over C64 emulator and find it very natural.
From a performance perspective FTM ran pretty well on my Hermes with the backgrounds enabled and the music running. There was some occasional slowdown but not enough that I felt the need to turn the backgrounds off in the menu. I did have an occasional memory error which kicked me out of the game, especially around level 20 but it wasn't that regular elsewhere and didn't really become a major problem.
UPDATE: Steve has changed the way the new release version of the game works and assures me that the memory issue is now fixed.
Pro's
Nice Graphics.
Well structured levels.
Nice difficulty curve.
Addictive story mode.
Took me 10 hours to complete story mode.
Con's
Cannot turn off SFX.
Control Method
Memory errors, especially around level 20
Music does not play properly. Stutters. (Hermes only)
Constant click click (Hermes only).
4WM Rating 85% 89%
UPDATE: Since the release candidate review copy of FTM I released Steve from inoGames has been very productive and fixed most of the technical issues I had with the game. I've increased my original rating to reflect this.
Conclusion
I've been banging on all review about how I love retro platformers and Firetop Mountain is certainly cast from the same mould as all the old classics. It's addictive, has a nice learning curve and contains a goodly amount of game time. I personally found it a touch easy, but inoGames plan to release a free expansion pack (Karn's Revenge?) which will obviously add to the game time. In short, Firetop Mountain is a blast from the past and whether you're a 30 year old miner Willy fan or a platform newbie you owe it to yourself to download the 10 level demo and take her for a test drive. You know it makes sense.
Linear Mode
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