Basil : The Great Mouse Detective

Copyright : Gremlin | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

From the basement of 221b Baker Street, Basil is attempting to solve a mysterious case involving the kidnapping of his friend Dr Dawson by the dastardly Professor Ratigan. Caught within the most sinister and fiendish plan of Ratigans career you venture through the backwaters of London, collecting clues along the way. Will your powers of deduction be enough to enable you to rescue Doctor Dawson from the villanous clutches of Professor Ratigan?

Graphics

The graphics in Basil are far from being ugly or badly presented but they do lack that special something, it?s hard to pin-point the most troublesome area but it certainly has a few faults. There are plenty of colours on offer (for those using Colour monitors at least) and some detail and time has been spent on creating the characters within the game along with the nicely drawn backgrounds. Having said that, the animation is a little off at times and can lead to some problems, Basil has the ability to take moon like jumps (despite being a mouse) and there are sometimes "sticky" problems with the ladders. When you consider that the game was marketed by Disney you would expect some kind of highly detailed game with nice animation, sadly Disney have never spent that kind of time on games as they consider it a small by-product of the empire.

Sound

Sound is pretty good also, we are treated to a nice introduction theme at the start of the game (just after the introduction screen loads) and there are some active elements of sound in the game itself, sure it?s nothing spectacular when you consider the names on the box but it certainly does the job. The only thing we will complain about in this game is the fact that the introduction music cannot be skipped, press the keyboard and joystick button as much as you want because it won?t do you any good. No doubt this will annoy those that frequently play the game and wouldn?t do any favours for the replay value today either.

Gameplay

Gameplay is kind of like the Dizzy games by Codemasters in the fact that you must dig out clues and avoid the nasty things along the way, this is sadly were the similarities end as Basil isn?t quite the game it cracked up to be. The control system is almost of nightmare proportions with that awful jump bug we mentioned earlier in the review (Basil can take off like KITT from Knight Rider) plus the fact that you need to push UP>LEFT or UP As we mentioned earlier, though we expected Basil to be a much better presented and overall a better game to play we weren?t that surprised when we loaded the game and found this. Disney have never spent large sums of money on computer games and with the movies taking in so much revenue the question you have to ask yourselves is - would you?
Finally, Basil isn?t a bad game but we are certain the game seemed better back in the day than it does now as the replay value has seriously dropped down a few notches.