Lil' Alien or Lil' Al? That is the question!
A rather poor Jet Set Willy clone which does have a few interesting twists, but fails to deliver in the long run.
The story is a little weird but kind of tried and tested. Al has crash landed on a nightmare planet where an insane warlord has pointed a duplicating ray at him and cloned him. This is where the first inconsistences pop up. The basic instructions say you're picking up the parts of your spaceship whereas the story says you're collecting parts of the machine? The machine indeed? What machine? I can only assume it means the machine that duplicated you? Anyway once you have all the parts of your ship, or the machine? You have to find your doppelganger and combine yourself with him to become whole again. Then I guess you get in your ship and go to the pub? Or something like that?
Al is quite an interesting sprite, but I will say a lot of the enemy sprites are very very generic looking, some of them look OK, but they're nothing special really. I do like that the objects you collect are 16x16 sprites as adverse to 8x8 sprites, problem here is it seems to mean the game is limited to one object per room, which is not really acceptable to somebody who likes these types of collect em' up flick screen platform games. Another somewhat bad quality to the gameplay is the jumping mechanics, oh no! It's got the triangle jumping, there's no smooth arch to the jump like JSW, Technician Ted, or Monty Mole, it's just diagonal up, stop, then diagonal down. So many JSW clones that have had potential to be fun games have been ruined by this type of jumping. One strange thing with the jumping is, if you jump while you're not moving you can jump straight up, and keep going about 1/3rd of the screen in height, it adds a little something to the gameplay, but doesn't fix it's brokenness. Bubbles are used as lifts, but they don't catch you, you have to keep jumping to move with them and jumping from them directionally is a pain in the arse, and usually result in you falling through them back to the bottom of where you were. LATHER! RINSE REPEAT! ALWAYS REPEAT!!!
The keys are bit off as well O and P for left and right, and Z for jump? Z??? Why not Space, or M, or even Q at a push. If you're going to use O and P why use Z for jump? It's not game breaking or anything, it's just a tad unusual if you ask me......and on we go.....
The game is quite colourful but the author decided to use some of the most garish colour combo's possible for the rooms, and the tiles. Couple this with the fact that the sprites seem to be constantly flickering, and your eyes start to feel like they're being pierced by hot needles after about 3 minutes of playing. It's weird it's not even like they flicker a lot, there's just enough to make it noticeably annoying, then after a while unbearable. The game also moves really slowly, too slowly in fact, simple as.
I still say for every game like this released after 1984 it should be at least on par with, or be a step ahead of JSW, not taking 2 steps backwards, tripping over the cat, and falling down the stairs.
It's a shame because as a massive fan of this type of game I see the potential in there for a great game, but the package is delivered just not to the correct standard. It's like ordering a Ming vase from ebay, and finding when you get home from work the delivery guy couldn't get an answer, so he shoved it through your letterbox.
....and finally...
Because the game has a few nice touches although terribly implemented I'll be nice and bump the score up from poor to average 3/5
