Zool The Ninja From The Nth Dimension Is Back

NEXT GEN PC SUXX , AMIGA STILL ROXX ?

I had pretty low hopes for this “remake” really, the first PC version I tried last year was far from good and while it looked like a ZOOL game it felt wrong, maybe it was just because I didn’t give it a chance at all to begin with?

How can a fan service (?) game really be any good at all when the developers (Sumo Digital Academy) can’t even get the correct assets into the trailer? Yes, the release trailer tells us about a Zool remake but while it does that it shows us the ZOOL 2’s box art (notice how ZOOZ and ZOON are shown…doh), the worst part is that the person who added that box art to the trailer also most likely removed the ZOOL2 logo on it.

One of my friends (hello Ade) at SUMO DIGITAL told me just a few weeks before launch that he really enjoyed this new remake and to be perfectly honest – this is the only reason why I rushed out to get it on the PS4 launch day…

RETRO IS MY TIME MACHINE …

Zool to me is yet another colossal time-travel machine and while I do remember a lot of stuff that connects with the time and era of a game, Zool was different.

It’s almost as if it had been wiped entirely out of my brain for decades, that was until I fired up this new Zool game. I all of a sudden remembered one of my best buddies from that era, his name is Karl Petter and he was not a gamer in general, he was more of a productive type of guy who loved magazine hype and tech write-ups. 

ADVANCED GRAPHICS ARCHITECTURE (AGA) WILL CHANGE THE WORLD…

Me and my brother made a lot of demos/tests and even a full commercial together with Karl Petter over the years, he knew shit and had a certain drive to do cool stuff with new apps and so on. Of course, I remembered that part but it was more about how he reacted to Zool when he first saw it and even more so when he tried Zool AGA (he got the Amiga 4000 first of all my friends, a whole 3 months before I got my 1200) for the first time right after that.

AGA is amazing and he kept going on about how amazing Zool looked in AGA, all I saw was a horrible mix of foreground and background graphics and at that very moment I more or less realized that more power, more colors, and more memory made no difference at all unless you actually put some care into it, heck all that graphical touchup even made the framerate really choppy and umm, ironically the framerate was one of the main sellers with the original A500 version…

I can also mention that I bought the CD32 on launch and I bought Zool for that as soon as it was released (a while after the console came out sadly) and I somewhat expected Gremlin to have fixed everything that was broken in the AGA version for this new CD 32bit Console wonder version, sadly that was not the case. They did add a new world and a few bonus levels that were exclusive to the CD32 version though, and they even added a raytraced intro and various smaller clips spread throughout the game, they even added lots of “Red Book” audio tracks (CDDA) too.

Has to be said that Zool 2 went back to its roots, both the floppy version and the CD32 version of that were nothing short of brilliant.

TIME TO CHOOSE: MODERN, CLASSIC, PARTY OR THE “ORIGINAL” GAME?

The first thing you will notice in this “reimaging” is that it has gone through quite a few changes to “dumb” down the gameplay so that it will fit new generation players better, luckily the old archaic gameplay can still be found in a mode called “ULTIMATE NINJA“, the biggest difference is that the standard version got endless continues and double jumping among other things.

There’s also a mode called party, which is a local multiplayer mode that consists of various mini-games that I really couldn’t get into, it is more for the kids than myself really, as an old Amiga gamer and fan of Zool I really can’t see any value in that mode sadly, notably, there was some mini-games spread out in Zool(s) on the Amiga but I doubt many even remembers them (bar the shoot ’em up part and perhaps the keyboard music game), I surely don’t and I played through both again a few years ago.

There’s also an emulated version of the classic game (woohoo, right?) but guess what, it is not the Amiga version (due to the Amiga ROM license probably, grrr) as the one included is the SEGA MEGADRIVE version which doesn’t really play at all like the Amiga version (WTF?).

ZOON THE DOG AIN’T IN HERE BUT THERE IS STILL A ZOOM (EHH UMM?) TO BE FOUND…

I really didn’t like Zool Redimensioned at first (as mentioned earlier), heck I would go as far as to say that I had no plans of getting the game at all but a friend at SUMO really liked it which basically gave me a reason to try it again, but guess what, I still didn’t like it, everything felt wrong and it played really bad, I don’t know but I just felt that the details, the challenges and the magic was gone even though it looked more or less the same as the original game…

This was until I found a “ZOOMED IN” option along with the usual stuff like CRT filter etc… 

I was mere seconds away from switching the game off for good, as soon as I switched the Zoom option to ON the game all of a sudden became good-looking and fun to play, and maybe best of all – it looked like how I remembered the game and maybe most of all it became harder as you couldn’t see all that far ahead anymore which probably was the main reason I didn’t like the new high-resolution widescreen look which made everything tiny and too open for such a game.

NOW THIS IS MUSIC IN MY EARS, OR IS IT?…

The second world (the music world) in Zool was in my opinion the worst level across both games as it simply made me rage all the time due to certain enemies and general color use and stupid enemies hidden in the floor etc… That said, there was some really cool stuff too, like the keyboard mini-game, the music notes, etc and yeah, when the level clicked, well then it worked really good, which can really be said about the whole game.  The developer has managed to include the special stuff that most Zool fans would love to rediscover even if a lot of that is basically “bad design” by the original developers (yes even the bugs).

OUR NINJA FROM THE 9TH DIMENSION EVEN GOT A SIDESCROLLING SHOOT ‘EM UP…

The shoot ’em up section made it to this new game too (woohoo!), that came as a surprise to be honest as most remakes/remasters or whatever from the retro era that have cross-genres or mini-games that go outside of the main gameplay design tends to be missing. 

A nice little shoot ’em up really, not many know this but this section was more or less forced into Zool by George Allan (the main dude behind Zool) as Gremlin really didn’t like mixed genres in their published games, the reason why there’s a shooter inside the game though is because of George’s love for Arcade games, especially games like Konami’s Nemesis and Salamander (yeah, you guessed it, the Gradius series). 

The shoot ’em up section in Redimensioned is somewhat boring, to be honest, it is just too easy (a bit like the rest of the game really) for seasoned players, oh and I felt it was over before it even started…

HOW ABOUT A BANANA OR A CACTUS UP YOUR BUM?

The Banana level as we called it back in the day (fruit), the house (toy), and the Sonic wannabe world (sand) can all be found in Redimensioned and I have to admit that I had a great time before I made it to these ones too, and while they really didn’t innovate or play any different from what I had experienced before it was still pretty fun to travel across the varied worlds of Zool.

One thing that can’t go unmentioned is how this retro game manages to look really good on my huge big-screen TV, unlike so many other new releases that use downscaling tools to make things look crap just because they want it to look retro, seriously developers need to stop destroying art by doing that…

It all felt like a solid remake until I made it to the final boss in the game where you had to jump on some friggin clouds while trying to kill that MOFO BOSS (won’t spoil it for you guys) that just can’t stand still at all, my goodness that is an awfully designed boss fight (just like the Megadrive boss btw)…

A CLASSIC ZOOL FAN ZOOMED-IN VERDICT IT IS THEN…

Now this is a tough nut to crack, I hated the game at first and then I found the zoomed-in camera option, and then the game grew on me, I simply couldn’t put it down and I kept hymning to the music while being annoyed like F… because of continuously my badly planned jumps and attacks. Seriously, Zool ReDiemsioned is fine if played like it is supposed to be played, that is with a closeup view where you simply can’t plan ahead all the time, Zool is meant to be played with blind jumps and random shooting to kill stuff offscreen which is something the default zoomed out mode won’t give you at all. Zool is quick, he can finally climb properly (or at all if you compare it to the Amiga version) and he can even do double jumps now which in the end makes it all in all a much better game than the original 1992 classic. The price tag is pretty much spot-on too ($7,99/£7,99).

Should you buy Zool Redimensioned? Well, I can recommend it to people who liked the original back in the heyday of the Amiga, but it is one of those games that you either love or hate I guess which means that you should just buy the goddamned game and try for yourself, that said, the zoomed-in function rescued it for me, others might want the zoomed-out perspective instead (most by the sound of other reviews by the look of things LOL), the main thing to remember though, this is a “new game” with old assets.

Zool ReDimensioned was part of a “school project” at the SUMO DIGITAL ACADEMY which is basically a trainee program (Click for a rather inspirational introduction Video) for people who want to get into the gaming industry, I’d say they nailed it as a first project.

I have included the release trailer below, pretty cool trailer all in all but notice how it’s only showing the zoomed-out mode, YUCK…