Turtix

Written by Jake on March 19th, 2007 and posted in Reviews
Tags : 2D, action, casual, platformer

Turtix is a new cute platform game for PCs by Alawar Games. It’s extremely well made and bound to appeal to lots of people.

Basically you play a turtle called Turtix who is a trainee wizard and you mess up a powerful spell that shatters a special amulet causing it to spread across the world. Naturally you have to go and find the pieces. You also discover that lots of young turtles from your School of Magic have been kidnapped, and you have to rescue these along the way as well. Anyway that’s the plot out of the way, so onto the game…

It’s a side on 2D platform game with a slight angle on the platforms to give a bit of 3D depth – this technique is quite common these days. The main game area scrolls extremely smoothly and the lovely backgrounds are two layered and thus have a nice bit of parallax scrolling. Turtix and the enemies are all quite large, not small and fiddly and this gives it a nice feel. The jumping is very smooth too, although sometimes I wished the character walked faster or had a run button (or you could double tap a key or the joystick to run like in Akuji the Demon or Golden Axe for example). You’ll find spikes, moving (and disappearing platforms), teleports, trampoline type objects and secret areas (the usual suspects).

The object of each level is to release the caged young turtles by jumping on the head of their guards and then kicking them when they are stunned. This is pretty easy, although later on some of the guards get a bit more tricky. There are also other enemies that you can jump on or that you must avoid altogether. Naturally each level is stuffed with gems that you can pick up for points and eventually an extra life. Oh and you’ll come across hearts to refill your health and very occasionally and extra life icon. Once you have released all the turtles the exit portal becomes active and you can move onto the next area. Pretty simple really. Oh and every 10 or so levels you have to fight a boss to get a piece of the amulet. You do this across 5 different land types, I believe: Oriental, Inca, Egyptian, Roman and Ice (not necessarily in that order).

So then, the graphics, story screens etc. and general presentation are fantastic but I basically felt that the game was empty - there wasn’t much to do! Collect gems, jump on a few heads and release some turtles and that’s it. After a few levels you get a double jump ability but that’s all I saw and I played it well into the second land. Perhaps there is another upgrade or some kind of weapon that I’ll discover later. It was also very easy for a long time, but perhaps that’s OK for most people. One thing I did like was joystick support - this is always a winner in my books even if the “action” button really just means kick. Shame it didn’t mean “operate this lever”, “pick this up”, “talk to this character” etc – but perhaps that is outside the remit of a simple causal game?

Anyway, my kids love it and think it’s cute, and it is really well made it just doesn’t have quite enough to keep me hooked, a bit like Scuba in Aruba and possibly like Turtle Odyssey (although I have to play that one a bit more to find out for sure). At the end of the day, my opinion is just mine, and you may well think differently; so the best way to find out is to have a go yourself

• Turtix Information

• Jake's Rating :

  Rating: 4
  Readers Rating : no rating yet
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• Price : $19.95
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