Review: Dizzy Prince of the Yolkfolk HD (Android)

It’s been almost two decades since the last Dizzy game was released so I’m sure a lot of gamers today never even heard of the little egg but Dizzy was a huge hit in the 80s on home computers, starting life on the ancient ZX Spectrum and later making it to other platforms including the NES!. In fact, a floppy with 5 Dizzy games were the first true games I ever played on PC so you can imagine they hold a special place in my heart. They weren’t the easiest of games and had their lot of unfair puzzles but that didn’t stop me from completing all of them even though I had to use a Dutch to English dictionary next to my keyboard (I was 13 back then, mind you!).

When I heard of a new version of The Yolkfolk being released for iOS and Android, my first reaction was positive, glad Dizzy wasn’t completely buried and forgotten. My second reaction was to wonder how they would translate the rather outdated model (which was very punishing) to a modern platform with many casual gamers? When I finally installed the game on my EEE Transformer tablet, I quickly found out: they pretty much gutted the game of anything even remotely challenging. There’s no health bar, no fixed amount of lives (you can die as many times as you want), you can save your progress and the game gives you hints on what to do if you’re stuck.

It wasn’t unexpected of them to introduce a save feature and unlimited lives aren’t a bad thing because Dizzy was always a weak action game where dying was a cheap way to force you to start over instead of a proper game mechanic but perhaps they’ve gone too far by simplifying things to such an extent. The upside, is that it’s now possibly to play it with your kids or nephews and nieces – it’s become more of a family game. After all, you have unlimited tries and things are pretty much spelled out now whenever you’re truly stuck. It’s also a decent introduction to real adventure games on PC.

The game does have one huge downfall, however, and those are the controls. The original Dizzy controls were extremely simple: cursor keys and a single action button. You could move, jump, pick up, drop and use items with just 4 buttons. Now, they have placed arrows on the screen that let you move when touched as you can see from the screenshot to the left. The round “button” is the action button. The “up” arrow you jump and the diagonal arrows makes you jump in the indicated direction.  Now, why they used such a clunky and confusing system, I don’t know – most platform games use a circle where, according to your finger movements, you can move and jump automatically, leaving your other thumb free to use action buttons.

The result is that jumping becomes far more of a pain than it was in the original games. Considering Yolkfolk has a load of jumping puzzles, this quickly becomes annoying since it takes several tries to even make a simple successful jump. The good news is, that it does support my EEE Transformer‘s keyboard meaning I can just use the cursor keys and ENTER on there to control Dizzy which is so much better. On the other hand, not many Android users have a Bluetooth gamepad or keyboard.

The inventory is annoying to use as well because, unlike the original versions, you can’t use the arrows to control it. You have to move your thumbs off the arrows to select the item you need. One more grievance of mine, is interaction: you need to be pretty much perfectly on top of something for Dizzy to interact with it. If you’re even slightly to the side, you’ll just end up opening your inventory instead.

All in all, this isn’t really a successful remake: the tension of the original game is completely gone and jumping has become a real pain to boot. Some areas are improved: the boat leading over the river Styx now carries you properly (in the originals, you had to manually walk on top of it or you’d fall off) and the game now also scrolls instead of being divided in screens but with the jumping (and the controls in general) being in such a sorry state, it’s hard to recommend it unless you have a Wiimote or gamepad you can hook up to your Android (or iOS) device. Don’t expect it to be as tough as the original games, though – it isn’t, not by a long shot.