Boulderdash

Copyright : First Star Software | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

If you have never heard of Boulderdash and its many clones over the past few years then you have seriously missed out on one of the biggest puzzling titles over the 1980s and 1990s. The idea is to raid the caves, steal the diamonds and watch out for any falling rocks on the way before leaving and spending the rest of your life in luxury.

Btw: Boulderdash was also released in the arcades so if you seriously don?t remember it you can refresh your memory with MAME.

Graphics

The early Boulderdash style games came in the form of Repton for the BBC Microcomputer, it was a fun game but the graphics (as can be expected) don?t quite match those found in First Stars Boulderdash series. Colours are much more vibrant, though still limited, animation is much better than Repton and everything looks so much neater due to a higher resolution.

There are plenty of visual treats in the game, these include the animated background used in the title for the game, the way you are presented on screen as items are drawn and indeed the explosion as the rocks hit you on the head. A very neat game indeed.

Sound

Boulderdash features a pretty neat little bit of music at the start of the game which (thank god) switches off as the game begins. There are plenty of digging, tingling, sparkling and explosion sounds throughout the game that just help to make it that little bit more interesting without reducing the playability of the game. A very nice job indeed.

Gameplay

As we mentioned earlier the idea of the game is simple, collect the diamonds and avoid being crushed by those huge rocks laying above you. It sounds a lot more simple than it is though as you?re almost guaranteed of crushing yourself to death in the first few tries, once you get used to it and as the level design never changes so nothing is random you can quickly learn were to move on each level and how to go about raiding the tombs.

In comparison to the origina arcade game this version does come extremely close, gone are some of the visual treats featured in the coin-op but just about everything game wise is still 100% in-tact and it remains a very addictive game to this very day.