Baal


There I was talking about unplayable Psygnosis crap in the review of the previous menu, and along comes #49 with Baal to prove my point! I've given this game lots of tries to win me over. It's got nicely drawn graphics, nice musics, smooth(ish) scrolling etc etc etc. But the game itself isn't that great.

The game itself is a platform shoot'em'up with some bits of flying around when you get to some positions in the level that grant you a jetpack. Your progress is restricted by some force fields that you can overcome by blowing up generators. And monsters that you have to blast. And of course the aforementioned flying bits that you have to make sure you have fuel before grabbing the jetpack.

First of all, the screen scrolls only when the player is near the edges, so it's rather hard to react quickly to a threat or no solid platform below your feet. So, bumping on enemies or hitting force fields or falling down to your death is really easy. This is really a bad design decision.

Then you got enemies that are really hard to hit as they're usually jumping around non-stop (and you can't fire while jumping), so you end up staying still and holding fire till the bullets decide to hit the enemy and die. Not to mention some stationary enemies that don't stop shooting at you and you usually have to perform massive feats to get behind them and kill them.

The jetpack bits are a real nightmare. Never mind that you have limited fuel and you have to find some before you take off (and in some areas I remember finding none. So, oops, stranded there to die). You have no map or visual aid on where the other jetpack points are. Oh yes, you have map coordinates being displayed, so you can note them down somewhere. Really intuitive for an action game.

From the above you can deduce that I don't like this game too much. Thankfully Wayne Smithson went on to better things than this, including the really cool Blood Money port!