Crystal Kingdom Dizzy

Copyright : Codemasters | Reviewed by : Haze

Dizzy returns in yet another adventure on the Amstrad CPC, by now it was obvious that Dizzy?s flame was begininng to burn at both edges but this adventure was larger than most previous outings and according to the packaging it had a lot more to offer.

The 16-bit version of this game reflected the size as Codemasters spanned it over 2 disks (at that time this meant either something special or 2 blank floppies) the Amstrad version was placed on a large cassette with a probable long loading time, was it worth the wait?

Here comes the review.

Graphics

never thought the day would come when I played a Codemasters game I well and truly hated, especially not in what had to be my favorite series of games, the Dizzy series. That day did however come when I first played what was the last in the Dizzy adventures series to hit the Amstrad CPC, Crystal Kingdom Dizzy.

Upon shelling out an unusually high price for the game, which game in rather less common cardboard packaging with a number of other goodies I was expecting something pretty impressive given the high standards set by the games predecessors, I couldn?t have been more wrong. The game is a disgrace to the Dizzy series, the first noticable thing was the graphics, gone was the medium resolution, 4 well used colour screenmode, in its place the ugly low resolution higher colour mode, this game didn?t look like Dizzy! It was sad to see, garish ugly graphics, undetailed characters, a real mess of something which had been done so well in the past. The Jump animation for the main character had even been exchanged from an obvious ?jump on the spot? animation which looked correct in the older titles for an angular jump animation which would have usually been used for diagonal jumps, visually this new version of Dizzy was not good to say the least.

Sound

Sound and Music really isn?t anything special either, nothing catchy like the classic tunes of Magicland Dizzy and Prince of the Yolkfolk, its really not worth remembering.

Gameplay

Now to the gameplay, something seems wrong here too, everything seems too ?arcade? like for a dizzy game, the physics seem to be off, and all in all it just doesn?t feel right to play, again more changes to what was a perfectly good system before. The game now also offers a sort of ?save? mode via ?Game Genie? codes, Game Genie was a device released for some consoles which allowed cheating in games, however here Codemasters have used the name to provide a system of being able to restore your progress at certain points later on. Good some of you may say, the Dizzy games were usually too long to complete in one sitting anyway and it could be frustrating if you died late on. Good it could have been, however the fact of the matter is that Crystal Kingdom Dizzy provides puzzles so unimaginative, or simple, or obvious anyway just to the fact theres nothing else you could do that you won?t really need the feature, the game never leaves you scratching your head or wondering what to do next, its sickeningly simple to complete in a single go, and even after you have you?re really left wondering if that was ?it?. There are NO memorable locations in this game, NO puzzles that make you think ?that was clever? infact the game boast nothing at all worth remembering.

All in all this just does not feel like a Dizzy game, even the characters seem out of character, the dialogs somehow wrong, Codemasters already had a winning formula, just for some unknown reason opted against using it for this release, and as a result you?re left with a very poor last adventure for Dizzy on the Amstrad CPC, I personally find it very hard to class this even as part of the series its such a step down. Probably the worst use of my cash when buying games for the CPC ever.