We do live in an era where developers and publishers are scrambling to tap into nostalgia and make some (relatively) easy money from reminding people of the games they loved growing up. There’s no end to Final Fantasy, Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Rogue-based releases going around, after all. I must admit, though, that I never thought we’d see someone try to dust off Boulder Dash.
That’s not to criticise the 40-year-old classic property. It was a pretty big deal back in its day, particularly with the critics, and had sold 500,000 copies which, by the standards of those days, was a real hit. It’s just that it wasn’t as influential as many of those other classic properties. Mr. Driller has echoes of Boulder Dash in it, and perhaps SteamWorld Dig, but I’d be scratching the deepest recesses of my brain to think about anything else that claims this classic as its ancestor. However, the new IP owner, BBG Entertainment, is looking to bring it back with explosive style, and having toyed around a bit with Boulder Dash 40th Anniversary, I think there might well be some hope for the team.
For those who have never played Boulder Dash, the game offers a simple premise – you run around an environment across both the X and Y axis, digging through dirt on the hunt for jewels. The problem is that if you dig the dirt underneath either a jewel or boulder, and then move away, everything above you will come crashing down, killing your little avatar if you’re not able to find a safe space. Meanwhile, there’s a timer ticking down, so you do need to move quickly. These things combined give Boulder Dash its challenge – you need to puzzle through gravity, and do so quickly, else you may either trap yourself, with boulders blocking your pathway to the exit, or become squished.
There are enemies that start to pop up soon enough, so you’ll need to also contend with them (and take advantage of them, as squished enemies become gems). In the new levels designed for the 40th anniversary, there are more enemies, as well as moving walls and other such traps to add further variety to the basic mechanics. However, for the most part, Boulder Dash is beautifully simple and really quite infuriating for the way it tends to inspire mistakes and then totally punish you for them.
For this edition, there has been a decided effort to “arcade up” the experience, with your avatar moving far more quickly and fluidly, and completing levels quickly is critical for getting points. So you’re going to take even more split-second risks and end up messing up levels even more frequently. For players with the patience for the learning curve, however, there is going to be some real thrills in mastering the slick movement and nailing a “perfect run” through a level.
Speaking of levels, there are a lot of them in this package. For a start, there are more than 120 all-new levels of escalating difficulty. On top of that, there are all the levels from the original Boulder Dash 1, 2 and 3, complete with retro graphics. And then on top of THAT, there’s a construction set to make your own levels. If nothing else, there’s a lot of value in just clearing everything in the game, and that’s before you consider that the developers are hell-bent on making this a competitive eSport and incentivising players to really master every level.
Just two things disappoint me about Boulder Dash 40th Anniversary. One is the art style. It’s very generic “made for mobile” stuff. The gems themselves look like rejects from a Bejewelled spinoff, the avatar has very little personality, and the environments look like they were ripped from those utterly horrible fake puzzle game ads that are, mercifully, now starting to go away on social media. I ended up enjoying the original Boulder Dash levels because they retain the original aesthetic, and that retro look is quaint.
The other thing is the way that progress is rewarded through stars. Yep, the developers cribbed that same “get one to three stars for completing a level, based on how well you did” progression system that the likes of Angry Birds made synonymous with mobile gaming, and I cannot stand having my OCD side stressed into playing levels over and over again just to try and clear that last star. It’s cheap and tacky and there’s a reason that relatively few games outside of the mobile space do it any more.
That being said, I did have a lot of fun with Boulder Dash 40th Anniversary, and while this is only a preview version, it’s already clear that it’s near final. It plays incredibly smoothly, and with some good energy that makes it very moreish. Every time I sat down to play, I ended up playing for far longer than I intended to, and I think this one is going to turn some heads on its full release.
