Leger vs. Hard 'n' Heavy (Amiga)

Of course going head to head with a behemoth such as Nintendo made people think twice before making Giana 2: Arthur and Martha in Future World a reality.

Hence, Hard 'n' Heavy was born.

Still very much like The Great Giana sisters before it, but with a couple of major minor changes such as no longer having the characters breaking blocks with their punky heads and all the colourfullness flushed down the toilet paving way for a metallic, cold brown and grey mess of genericness.

Thing is, Giana sisters may have gone a bit too far with enemies resembling Goombas, every fourth stage taking place inside a castle and the upgrade system copying the mushroom, fire flower and, uh...

Hard 'n' Heavy, on the other hand, strays so far away from anything unique, unpleasantly dictating the fact that the Gianas never had personality of their own while watching the alien looking helmets stripping them of every last bit of identity.

With a year behind them one could have hoped for some kind of insight, evolution of whatever kind, but besides the annoyingly bouncy projectiles taking turns with a flamethrower and the aquiring and usage of bombs and shields nothing new of worth can be seen.

Anywhere.

Thus, what we have is some twentyfourish grey, brown (and sometimes a bit green and blue) short stages which although not unpleasantly designed lacks the memorable sections found all over in the precursor.

Which all ends in some kind of boss fight paving way for stage one again.

No ending.

No credits roll.

Nothing.

Hard 'n' Heavy feels unfinished.

Not only due to a lack of a proper ending (even The Great Giana Sisters had one, although lackluster in every sense) but also due to some sometimes iffy but not game breaking collision detection and seemingly rushed presentation.

The title screen is presented in full screen glory, but when the actual gameplay part kicks in it leaves like 1/3 of the lower part of the screen completely black (an apparent 50/60/PAL/NTSC oversight).

To be fair, there is nothing particularly WRONG with Hard 'n' Heavy.

If anything it feels like a Commodore 64 game converted to the Amiga with a minimum of effort put into making use of the hardware at hand.

Volker Eloesser (who apparently took over the coding during the project due to the original coder getting sick along the way) has delivered a quite stable and smoothly running game, the graphics by the nameless Man Without Name are although generic never intrusive or offensive and the soundtrack is actually not bad at all... but expecting less from Mr. Hülsbeck I do not ever do.

While being short and rather easy its is never tuly boring and the stage design is fair although not all that inspiring.

Not bad.

Just not that good, either.

Let us go with... passable.