Crystal Kingdom Dizzy

Copyright : Codemasters | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

Dizzy is back once again and this was one of his final outings by the guys at Codemasters, released in 1991. Once again our eggy hero has gotten himself in some bother with with evil wizard and its upto Dizzy to sort things out.

As mentioned in our earlier review by Haze this is one huge game with an extreme loading time, not rated highly by Haze - do we think different?

Graphics

Ok, we are all used to our eggy friend being in less than 8 colours and slighlty poorly shade of green. The latest outing made full use of the CPC colours system and rendered our hero in the correct colours with a smaller screen size and slower frame rate to much.

In short, this game doesn?t look or feel like any of the previous Dizzy games and that certainly is not a good thing.

There are more problems with the new engine as you will notice that whenever you walk past a bright coloured background our little friend becomes lost and is very difficult to see, those that had a green screen monitor most likely had to switch the brightness and contrast down just to be able to spot him.

At first glance, it might impress but underneath all that gloss is a very poor excuse for a dizzy game.

Sound

Sound has also changed since the previous outings our hero has been in. Codemasters have done away with the catchy tunes of the olden days and replaced it with a much more generic title track, it doesn?t stand out and is something you will easily forget within 30 minutes of hitting your reset button. Not something you will be humming on the bus ride home from work and thats for sure.

Gameplay

There was a time when Dizzy kicked the living crap out of all other adventures but the fire was going to burn out at some point but who would have thought it would be the very publishers of the original title that would put the nail in the coffin.

We have seen worse Dizzy games (Dizzy Panic/Rapids etc) but there didn?t attempt to be the same game we once knew and have been forgiven, CK Dizzy on the other hand tried to become something fans didn?t want.

It looks and feels like an arcade game, many changes have been made and a new engine is in place. On top of all the negative comments about this game the game was stored on a C60 size cassette and you can only imagine how long you would be waiting for the game to load before playing for 10 minutes and rebooting.

Shame on your Codemasters.