Where do I even start?

These new entries in historic franchises are always…tricky. Especially anniversary releases. They tend to carry a lot of weight to them…But they also tend to make the sorts of mistakes that happen when you’re not paying enough attention to the part of the market you’re actually aiming for.

Let’s talk.

Dashing

So, Boulder Dash is in that weird murky space between ‘game’ and ‘franchise’ where there’s really just one concept, iterated on many times via ports and expanded releases that add new content to the same core. It’s kind of like Pac-Man in that way, where (ignoring a few evolutionary dead-ends) there’s really only a couple of fully distinct titles, and tons of different ways to engage them.

Also kind of like Pac-Man, Boulder Dash is a bit of a maze game. You work your way through soil, navigating around packed material to gather up enough gemstones to open the exit of a stage…And grab some more on your way out, if you have the time. While also trying to find the secret ones that are buried and invisible until you free them, and also avoiding the boulders. Which have gravity. And thus will fall and crush you, or even roll into you if the path is in its favor.

At its core, this is a simple, solid little premise perfectly suited to its origins in the 80s. It works well, managing a nice little mix of reflex and strategy in the Classic levels pack of this particular iteration.

Boulder drop

But therein lies the problem.

I’ve buried the lede here a little bit, but let’s dig it up and swing it around in a fashion most inappropriate.

Boulder Dash Deluxe is built on the back of the mobile (and Switch) game Boulder Dash 30th Anniversary, sharing what seems to be a fair bit of content and the graphical style. Tons of parts of this game just feel like a mobile game because of it, but let’s start with those graphics, yeah?

The graphics here are…The issue is not that they’re technically bad, or pushing a low amount of polys. The issue is that they are artistically weak, a specific kind of ‘cheap feeling’ that I associate with publishers slapdash assembling some devs to quickly get something out on that newfangled App Store for a quick buck after an executive’s kid asked for an Angry Birds t-shirt.

And the worst part is, 30th Anniversary actually looks better with its pseudo-Minecraft aesthetic, because at least that doesn’t make me want to return to the calming days of Playstation 1 pre-rendered cutscenes.

The fact that the game gave me a janky, awkward 3D rendering of the original player character was a blessing, compared to having to use their store-brand version of a preschool CGI cartoon protagonist. But the simple fact that he’s plastered to the game’s icon on my Switch immediately makes it look less pleasant, and less put together than even some first-time games I’ve checked out for this site.

Crushed

The mobile origins also seep into every part of the game. Levels give you minuscule amounts of Gold to buy early unlocks, or contain secret buried treasure chests that give you tiny progress towards whichever random thing you need 10 Ropes or whatever for…Which include not only some of the worlds, but various cosmetics and power-ups.

Oh, and you can use that Gold I mentioned to buy consumable things, like point doublers and boulder-destroying dynamite.

Guess what the list of In-App Purchases includes, in 30th Anniversary. Did you say, tons of Gold and also just directly buying those consumables? Good job, you solved my riddle. The only reason I wouldn’t call the game a whaling ship is because its initial release in 2014 was in a time when whale-hunting techniques were less refined, more blatant and not as successfully manipulative.

Also, a distinct lack of five-star ultra-rare anime JPEGs. You gotta have your five-star ultra-rare anime JPEGs if you want to chart a whaling vessel out into those deep seas.

Now, I should note that as of this writing, you can’t actually buy any of these in-app purchases on the Deluxe iteration. I’ve checked. So that’s good! But the game has not, in any way, been rebalanced for this fact. So instead of a whaling ship, we have…Well, the only description I can think to use is one those little swan paddle-boats getting knocked around in the deep sea.

Clean-cut

So why am I not doing my usual thing of “oh I wish this was better but it’s not”, even when I’ve been so very caustic and snarky in the last, ehhh, 700-odd words by my count?

Because the actual gameplay is actually really solid. Active enemies add more reflexive play to the mix, the stages often present an interesting mix of little problems whose consequences can collide into eachother, and the tight scale of each level (often just one or two screens across in either direction) gives it a nice little game-snack vibe.

And see, that’s the problem.

Now I’m mad. Most of the time when I sit here and go “Oh, I hope the devs come back and fix these problems that made me so dislike the game”, I’m disappointed because a dev team’s reach so clearly exceeded their grasp, and I want to see what they were reaching for.

But here, here I can see exactly what they were reaching for. I can play levels from the original goddamned game that reached and grasped at what this was supposed to be! I CAN SEE THE QUALITY DESIGN RIGHT, FUCKING, THERE!

And yet they fucked it. The dev team cocked it up with an utter unforced error on what’s supposed to be the least make-or-break part of a game, the graphics. This could have looked like a damn Flash game from the mid-2000s and it would be a significant improvement. Add on top of that the mobile cash grab balancing, and, I just…

Don’t buy this, alright? Go find another way to play the original. Go find one of the other, older remakes. The core gameplay loop is great, but this…This just isn’t it, mate.