Lemmings

"Build, Dig, and Bomb your way to victory"

The World of Lemmings, creatures that walk mindlessly into peril unless you give them skills to make their way to the exit in the stage. Levels range from really easy to insanely hard! You can give them these different skills: Climber, Floater, Bomber, Basher, Builder, Miner, Digger, Blocker. Use those skills given to you to get the lemmings to safety. The objective is to get a certain percentage of the Lemmings to safety in each stage. 2 players can play simultaneously, but in special stages for 2 players. Where they try to get their own lemmings to their properly colored exits.

Gameplay-5
You must get the mindless creatures to safety with required skills. Each level is a premade level designed to exploit the right skills to get them to safety, each with it's own hazards. You have to worry about hazards, and making sure you do not run out of a required skill, which could spell disaster for the whole level.

Control-10
All you do is assign them skills. The only things you do is select a skill, assign skill, scroll map,and you can jump to any part of the map by clicking on the part of the map you want to jump to. You can also increase/decrease the release rate with the + and - signs on the left. But you cannot go below the starting release rate. You need your brain not for the controls, but to think ahead what to do and how to get past it without losing the level.

Sound-9
The music is cool! and some have special tracks that appear in one level, those rock! One funny sound is the funny splat sound of a digital lemming falling too far and hitting the ground and turning into a pile of pixels on the ground (which disappear BTW) The sounds are simple, but the music plain rocks!

Graphics-7
Not much focus on graphics here. The graphics are decent, and make the game realistic enough, they are just average. The final level cutscenes are well done though.

Playability-10
No glitches and young and old can play this game, but it takes a lot of practice, patience, skill, and thinking power to make it through some of them harder levels. Some levels you may wonder how they are even possible to beat. But they are all beatable. It is easy to play, hard to master. What most games should be.

Replay Value-6
You can replay each level again, mess around, and play 2P competition games when you want to play with a friend. There are quite a few levels, so no shortage anytime soon.

Buy? Borrow? Rent? Burn?
You might want to borrow it, or rent it if that is not possible, definitely rent before you think of buying, unless you find it for $5, then buy it anyway. The game is decently good, so it is a fair buy.

Saving
The game has a password feature, just remember the passwords given to you (write them down) and you can go to any level. Good thing about the passwords are if you enter a level password, you can play ANY of the previous levels before that level you entered the password for...so if you entered the last level password code for a difficulty setting, you can play all levels in that setting! Cool eh?

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 07/17/01, Updated 07/17/01