Leger vs. Defenders of the Earth (Amiga)

It might be that I have seen some of 65 episodes of the animated series Defenders of the Earth from the eighties, but if that would be the case it feels like the impact of the experience comes quite close to zero.

Not that The Phantom, Flash Gordon, Mandrake the Magician and his bodyguard Lothar and the odd blue Zuffy with yellow hair lacks relevance, but in this very constellation (and especially in this game of lackluster everything) I can simply not bother to bother.

Most of the license based games were quick cash grabs at this point in time, with a few exceptions. Considering the developer Enigma Variations mostly dealt with these kind of products my guess is that you would be hard pressed to find something even remotely close to being a "classic" out of the nine games they developed for the Amiga.

But I would love to be proven wrong.

So, this Defenders of the Earth... what about it?

As Flash running from left to right, right to left, jumping, entering doors and shooting at everything that comes your way without ever getting room to breathe all that is left to do is to every now and then press the spacebar to get one from your team to perform a task.

Such as kicking down a door, use a computer to disable a force field or with the help of magic make a bridge appear.

It takes some time to do so, and if they are interrupted you will have to wait a while until being able to ask them again, all while watching your health getting drained by evil bastards spamming the screen.

You could try to keep your health by hammering the fire button until your finger start to bleed, but what is the point?

All you get by doing so is more of the same, room after room, with the occasional boss with more or less unavoidable attacks.

Oh, and of course the experience is without music (except on the title screen), the presentation uses full screen graphics in PAL everywhere except when playing (when the graphics only uses the NTSC part of the screen leaving the bottom third pitch black) and the Level 1 said to be loaded when starting the game never reaches a Level 2 before the game is completed.

Defenders of the Earth on the Amiga is nothing but pure crap.

Well, besides the actual coding of the game (it runs really smooth in 50 frames per second, most of the time) and some of the graphics which does not really look all to bad.

But...