I may have to start asking for ideas on how to begin these reviews soon, because yep, you guessed it, this one is another retro style platformer. This time, front and centre is the titular yellow mascot, Ziggy. Despite being missing from the cover art, I can confirm the little fella does don a rather fetching top hat in-game. Nice.
Yes it’s platforming, but the focus is on precision. You know the drill, as soon as you clock the death counter in the corner of the screen it becomes crystal clear what type of game Ziggy is. You’ll get killed a lot, but this will have barely any effect as you respawn almost instantly and go again.
Each of the thirty levels has one or more checkpoints in the shape of old school arcade cabinets, which do provide a little relief as you aim for the totem pole labelled with the word “Goal”. Each level is presented before you on a single screen, as you gingerly navigate your way through numerous obstacles from one side to the other.
Ziggy is a nippy character, so it’s all too easy to take an extra step or two and get impaled on a spike, torn to shreds by a buzzsaw or zapped by a laser. You’ll need to be careful, and make use of Ziggy’s limited range of abilities to make it through. Or, more likely, die enough times until you’ve learned the best route to the exit.
Ziggy can jump, jump again and dash. That’s your lot. It’s simple enough and despite some bold claims in the game bio, there’s nothing here you won’t have seen before. The dash ability is necessary for clearing large gaps, and navigating tight spaces too. It takes a few seconds to recharge between uses, as I found out the hard way after plunging to my death several times. There’s no way of knowing when, you will need to leave it a few seconds and hope for the best.
Tell a lie, Ziggy can also wall jump too. However, this complicates matters somewhat. The yellow fellow will automatically slide down walls when making contact with them. But, if you jump anywhere near a vertical surface, Ziggy will automatically push off from the wall and most likely impale himself on a spike. As precision is so important, it’s disappointing that this is lacking somewhat.
As I mentioned at the beginning, as this is a retro style platformer you can probably guess as to the graphical style developer Antonio Filipe has gone for. It looks fine, but the pixel art style has been done to death, revived, and done to death again. As you journey through the levels you will also visit five different biomes. Each is denoted by a different colour palette and chucks in some additional hazards to avoid, but it all feels so familiar.
Something I did notice was the star of the show features very little detail at all. I could barely make out Ziggy, who appeared as a sort of blurry yellow avatar; which was a bit of a let down (even taking the top hat into consideration). Still, I did enjoy the synth beats soundtrack more than I expected.
Ziggy offers a gradually increasing difficulty curve but niggly controls aside, never feels overly challenging. There are a few moments (such as auto turrets that feel a little too accurate at times) which border on unfair, however you shouldn’t have too much bother conquering the game.
In all honesty, although 30 levels sounds like a decent chunk, Ziggy is an incredibly short game, even for the reasonable asking price of £4.19. I’ve played umpteen of these platformers, and the typical level count is at least double that if not more. It took me 45 minutes to beat, and that includes netting all the achievements which are very easy to earn.
In a very crowded genre, Ziggy comes up short, mostly thanks to mechanics and features that we’ve seen many times before.
