Lemmings Revolution Review

Lemmings, we all know them don't we, loads of little animals that love to die. Well not so long ago, a group of programmers created a game that was stupidly addictive and was ported to practically every platform we have known. In this game you were required to save the lemmings using a bunch of skills that you could assign to them, these skills ranged from building stairs to bashing through walls. The game spawned a great sequal where the skills grew to encompass things like skiing and swimming, etc. Then there were other sequels which were kinda crap to be honest.

Now comes the age of 3D... In this era if your game does not have 3D in it most game companies don't even want to look at it once, let alone twice. So Lemmings is brought to age with its own 3D incarnation, Lemmings Revolution.

The story goes that The Lemmings had found their Promised Land and made themselves at home. Some took shelter in the forests, some by the ocean, while others settled in the desert. Some Lemmings even colonised the snowy wilderness, while those with particularly good building skills constructed magnificent towers, which circled the land.

Little did the lemmings know that their legendary tales were noted by the weasels, who captured the lemmings and put them in boxes, when they had finished playing practical jokes with the lemmings they set traps in each of the lemmings homes (towers) and then set them free, their only escape via hot air balloons which have been placed to lure the lemmings towards the traps.

Now the gameplay is dead simple, Psygnosis have taken us back to the first game where you only had a small number of skills to work with, and using them you help your lemmings get to a balloon which doubles up as the exit of the level.

There are meant to be over 200 levels for you to play around with and they quickly get very hard. The first few teach you the essential skills and how they are used. You start off by only digging, then the next level you only float, and so on until you have got all the necessary skills to move onto the harder levels.

The levels are ordered in a pyramid fashion so you start off with only a few levels to begin with and each level you complete allows access to 2 other levels and so on. So quickly you build up a situation where you can choose your next challenge but always have the ability to go back to the map and choose a different level if your stuck.

This game is the simplest game to control ever to grace the earth. I mean ok, you have a big tower that you need to look over right, so press the right mouse button and rotate it to where you want. If you need to select a different skill, just click on the skill icon, then on a lemming that's meant to use it, if the lemming already has a skill that cant be undone then he does not get highlighted so you don't go wasting your skills.

One of major gripes with the first game was that even though they were damn addictive, if you had a large mass of lemmings together you could never attach a skill to the lemming facing the right direction. Instead you would just click a few times on a spot hoping that you would catch a lemming that was going where you wanted, which would never happen. In this game they have added a great feature where the lemming you want to select highlights and if you press the left or right arrow keys you will get to highlight lemmings only going in that direction, cool!

There are 3 types of lemmings that make the game slightly harder. You have your standard lemmings that die when they fall in water or lava, then you have your water lemmings that can walk on water but die in lava and last but not least, yes you guessed it, lava lemmings that walk on lava but die in water. The different types of lemmings can be all released on one level so the further you get into the game the harder it gets.

One last thing is that you can zoom into the levels for a close look. Its not the best zoom feature, just press the spacebar and you zoom in a set distance, press it again and you back to the standard view, nothing fancy, but essential a lot of the time.

The in game graphics are nothing special, but they do the job to a T. Theres no special effects, the game does not need any. Plain and simple texturing make the game look really nice, and since your not really charging round a level blasting your weapons the textures are nicely detailed and look great zoomed in.

There are some added bits to the levels like torches, stairways and other background bits that make the level look more complete. You get some levels that are really dark and moody and other levels that are bright because they are set outdoors. But as a whole they server the purpose and look nice too.

The game sound is bound to be simple. You get sound effects when lemmings die, you get the cool 'lets go' lemmings patented start sound and various other effects when they exit a level or get blown up. The game music is great, if you played the first set of lemmings games then it will take you back.

Overall this game puts my faith back into the lemmings set of games. The first game was really addictive, the second expanded on that to create a great sequal while the others just went silly and I didn't like them at all, but this, brings it back down to earth and I like it!