A Look At Projekt: Lila Remastered

It is crazy to think that it has been nearly 3 years already since i received this Projekt: Lila game, there are several reasons to why I never did get around to review it but the main one was that when I got this game I also got the over-hyped console thingy called the IndieGO!, a console that I really wanted to like but just couldn’t get into at all, it was just too cumbersome and time consuming for me to use/set up and sadly I didn’t enjoy using it either.

Projekt: Lila was one of a few games that were released to promote the IndieGO! brand and I love that they tried to push it like they did, but a machine that was supposed to be the ultimate Amiga CD32 emulation machine meant that I actually thought it would run all my CDTV and CD32 games out of the box without any hassle at all, sadly it didn’t and i parked the console for months before I ever used it again.

The IndieGO! works better today thanks to loads of fixes and software updates but I have sadly lost interest in it ages ago, the good part though is that I managed to get some physical editions of the IndieGO! games and yes, Projekt: Lila is the first I will write about (more to come eventually).

Many moons have since passed, Projekt: Lila has been sitting inside the IndieGO! package for years, I finally pulled it out again now and started to test the game on my Amiga CD32 instead of on the IndieGO! and I instantly felt guilty for not doing a review earlier.

Projekt: Lila is an action platformer by the team that brought you the Tales of Gorluth series -AmiWorx Software and they are a very active Amiga developer who uses the Backbone engine/toolkit to craft their games.

ARES published two versions of Projekt: Lila for some reason, I got both but I can’t remember why or for what reason but it is most likely because of Pascal Papara (the guy behind ARES/INDIEGO!) who decided to give me both versions for testing, a really good guy with loads of talents with a huge friendly glow around him.

The game comes in two different boxes, one just being a simple CD Single jewel case (possibly an OEM bundle version for the IndieGO!…) and the other version (the Remaster version?) being a DVD sized case with a manual inside.

A positive thing with both releases is that they went and produced proper CD’s and not just a CDR with a sticker on it, well done!

This is the manual included in the DVD case, it is in colours at least and yes it is more of a promotion flyer than an actual manual i guess, according to this item there was produced 500 copies of the Remastered version of the game (i got copy 114).

The difference between the two versions is finally revealed here in the manual, the REMASTERED version is actually the only version that actually Auto boots on the Amiga CD32 and also there’s a level selection screen too (similar to the Gorluth CD32 title then) which means that it is almost as if there’s a cheat option for the console owners.

The gameplay mechanics in Projekt: Lila is a bit on the weak side and one of the negative things is while playing the game is that it becomes really repetitive due to the jumping mechanism and yes the single weapon system means that there ain’t any ways to upgrade your weapon or even change it to a better one.

In order to complete a level, you are supposed to kill everything and pick up something the enemies drop called  “Ebrains” in order to open the next level, oddly enough I have done several levels now without killing everything which means that either I met a bug or something the goals of the levels might be a bit off.

The music in the game is actually pretty good in some of the levels but some songs can be a bit of a letdown sadly as they loop for way too long, that said, there are quite a few songs available and some unused bonus ones on the CD too.

The graphics are far from what you can achieve on a CD32, no details in backgrounds nor parallax scrolling what so ever and with only one enemy at the screen at a time means that even if the graphics had been super cool it would have still felt empty and stale.

Projekt: Lila is a P.D. game in my eyes and while it is better than many attempts over the years it still falls short by not being fun to play which means I got problems recommending it to you, but with that said it has to be mentioned that the developer is active and they show progress with every single title they have made so far and yes, Tales Of Gorluth III looks like will be even a better game than I first anticipated, therefore, I can’t recommend you support them as a team enough. Support Amiga Developers, let the Amiga shine again!

Oh, one more thing…

I found a shop online who sell the game,  might be others out there too in case you are keen on a copy, Support Amiga Dev but look for a copy that ain’t too expensive, IMO this should not be priced higher than 10 Euros…

https://kryptobay.eu/product/projekt-lila-amiga-cd32-incl-remastered-cdrom/

Still undecided? Well, check out the video below.