Leger vs. Kid Gloves (Amiga)

As a one man project, with some sound help from Mr. Whittaker, Timothy Closs have managed to deliver both a simple looking, almost ugly to be honest, but extremely addictive little platformer.

Obviously inspired by ZX Spectrum classics, such as Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy, the extremely pixel perfectness required to get pretty much anywhere in Kid Gloves screen flipping adventure might turn people off.

But, persistence is key and with it comes learning, developing strategies and getting friends with the ruthlessly stiff controls.

At times you actually do not have more than a single pixel to work with, as a matter of life and death thing, but luckily most obstacles can be dealt with in a rather safe way.

See, spending time on a single screen makes things happen. One thing at a time, such as enemies appearing or walls disappearing. Taking out enemies is seldom a hard thing to do, as long as one is strategically placed somehwere where projectiles may reach the baddies.

Rushing through things most often result in disaster, and since no more than two projectiles (bouncing around the screen for a while until hitting something nasty) can be active at the same time planning the attacks is a necessary thing to do.

And, no, not everything can be killed.

Making things more complex is a simple shop where some few beefier weapons can be bought aswell as extra lives, bombs, keys and magic.

Bombs clear out all the killable enemies on the screen, magic delivers a random kind of effect (such as slowing down time, transforming dangerous objects into pickupable fruits and such the like) and keys removes certain otherwise unpassable objects.

It will quickly be rather obvious that keys are really scarce, and so is money, and it is very much possible to make choices that fucks everything up so nothing more than starting all over seems like the only option.

Hence, the puzzle ascpect comes into place. Not really much more complex than having to consider in which order to do what, but it is there to be dealt with.

Kid Gloves might seem like a really hard game, at first.

But, by repeated tries and thought through strategies used it will sooner or later seem perfectly possible to beat all the 40 screens covering four different environments (in time, yeah... the Kid Gloves seem to make time travelling possible, to some kind of uncontrollable extent).

Not to ignore the fact that there is one quite fatal flaw: Climbing, or rather, getting hold of things to climb during a jump can be annoyingly hard. Considering a few screens almost demands you to do pixel perfect jumps, and grabbing something to climb while doing so, this can almost break the game completely.

If you do not find ways around this issue, or use magic to turn the hasards below the climbable things into fruit.

Oh.

Still... a rather lovely little game, this is.

If you allow it to be.

It will most certainly take some time to get to grips with how to play, how to think, and to finally reach some of the later stages.

And it would not have hurt the slightest if the graphics would have been somewhat more pleasing on the eyes or the different environments having had theme songs played during gameplay.

But, anyways...