Botkiller 2

Both of Artex Software's previous commercial releases, space strategy game Exodus and point-and-click adventure Ankh, have been superb titles worthy of their five star awards. It's a fair bet, then, that they're hoping that their latest release, Botkiller 2, goes down just as well.

As the '2' in the title implies, Botkiller 2 is the sequel to an earlier game. Both are platform puzzlers with pretty much the same gameplay elements, but in this follow-up title the single-screen levels of its progenitor have been expanded into large scrolling arenas and the scale of your view has been greatly increased to match. It also now costs money - the original was free.

The original game (left) and Botkiller 2 (right)

Botkiller 2's main character has relatively few actions - you can walk, jump, duck or fire one of five different guns. The game world itself is mainly just a bigger version of that in the original game, centring around transporters, lethal beams, consoles, locked doors and reaching the exit. Even many of the enemies look and act pretty much the same as in the original game. Puzzles generally centre around discovering blocks which you can destroy to access new areas, finding keys to open doors and activating and summoning the various elevators and transporters to travel around the level, whilst avoiding those lethal beams. The enemies are just there to get in the way.

Nicely presented, with well-drawn and animated graphics, Botkiller 2 is a fairly enjoyable game. A bit more variety in the level decoration wouldn't have gone amiss, but at least what's there has some animation to liven things up. The tracker-based music is fairly atmospheric, albeit eventually repetitive, and the sound effects are reasonable if a little unsubtle. A mysteriously loud footstep effect as you walk is guaranteed to annoy, and bizarrely you cannot disable the music and sound effects individually. The overall sonic effect, however, is to make the game seem reasonably alive.

The old:

and the new:

Botkiller 2 does make a good first impression. It is nicely packaged in a glossy colour CD case (although it actually comes on a single HD floppy) and starts with a brief but adequate title sequence which is followed by an attractive menu and help screen. The status display during the game is nicely designed, and there are a few graphical gimmicks here and there (although nothing especially impressive - the small, transparent explosions simply look odd and it would undoubtedly look more convincing without them). The levels scroll smoothly and there is a 'filtered' display mode which apparently makes the display look a bit better - it actually just makes it look a bit blurred and it slows the game down on my ARM710 machine, making it an odd choice of default.

If you enjoyed Botkiller then chances are you'll enjoy this even more. The puzzles are generally more involved, although there are still many difficult jumps and beam-avoidance timings to get right. Botkiller 2's graphics and scrolling levels are so much bigger than the single-screen, small character ones of the original that you sometimes need to spend some time just exploring each level to work out how it all fits together, a process made more complex by the frequent use of teleporters to take you to another area. This removes some of the instant playability of the original game and also means that on some of the more empty levels you spend a lot of time just wandering around in the hope of finding a missing key or some such. At some points in the game this is a serious problem - you can't save within a level and their sheer size means that even after playing a level for a long time you can lose all your lives and need to play through from the start again. Some of the levels also have design flaws where making one mistake means you have to deliberately lose all your lives and then start again.

You can buy upgrades in the shop:

The shop assistant has had a makeover since the original version:

As you play through the game you inevitably get stuck, and often it is necessary to attempt certain jumps many times until you manage to work out how to time them correctly - or even discover if they are possible at all. Because it can take so long to play through to a particular point this can be a frustrating and seriously time-consuming process. Annoyingly, jumps that look perfectly possible sometimes aren't because of the strange physical rules that allow you to redirect your jump whilst in the air but not to enter gaps in walls whilst falling. Successive perfect-timing manoeuvres might be tolerable in a single-screen environment but within large levels they're a serious annoyance and Botkiller 2 is sometimes far too fussy. If you're jumping up to a platform it is much too easy to accidentally double-jump, and the game is very unforgiving when requiring you to jump from platform to platform. It's an old school title that needs some new lessons.

The sprawling size of some of the levels is a serious annoyance not only due to the need to continually repeat a series of actions but also because unfortunately your character walks at a remarkably slow pace and there is no option to run. It can take minutes to walk across a level and sometimes you may need to go back and forth several times in order to complete it. This can seriously hamper the pace of the game and discourage you from further attempts to complete a level. This is bad design and there's no real excuse for it. You are given a password between levels but this doesn't help compensate.

Speed and size problems aside, the levels vary wildly in quality. Some of them - almost without exception the smaller ones - are excellent fun, but the larger ones are frequently tedious and dull. There are also many examples of careless level design, with restart points sometimes mindlessly placed, positions where you can fall off the bottom of the level when temporarily invicible and get stuck, and occasions where a tiny mistake can make the rest of the level impossible. There are also far too many long walks which have no gameplay purpose at all. 'Botkiller' could almost be a comment on how much sitting around you have to do.

The game features four bullet-firing guns and one rocket launcher, but bizarrely you can walk faster than your bullets. Equally strangely the bullets bounce off walls, damaging you in the process. This is frequently rather unfair given that you are forced to randomly fire at walls in the hope of finding secret passages (unless you spot the clues which indicate them). Another frustrating element is that you have a limited number of bullets, so often you find yourself having run out of bullets and only able to fire extremely slowly. This rarely makes the game any harder but simply forces you to procede at a pace that even a snail would find slow. It might have worked if the levels had been planned more carefully and you weren't forced to attack random walls in the hunt for passages, but as it is it simply annoys.

There's a good game inside Botkiller 2 that sometimes peeks out, and on the levels which are nicely compact and carefully designed it is fulfilling and rewarding to play. Luckily there are enough of these sections to keep you playing through most of the boring parts, but it's a fine line that Botkiller 2 teeters on the edge of breaking. With more care taken over the level design this game could easily have been superb, but as it is it's merely competent. It is fun, however, and £15 is a very reasonable price - because of this budget price it just scraped four stars instead of three. It's also considerably better than many other available games, and easily the best release of the moment. It won't set the world alight, but then it clearly never intended to.

Requirements

A demo version is due for release 'soon'.

Distribution

You can download the original Botkiller game either from Acorn Gaming or from Artex Software.

...this page last updated: 4/7/99...
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