My review of Brave Dwarves: Back for Treasures (set 5):
Before I begin this review, let me say this: THIS GAME IS HORRIBLE. It's like what Magnussoft would have made on a higher budget. The object is to run through several excessively large caves, collect all three keys, find the door, and exit the level. It's a pretty similar concept to that of the Turtle Odyssey games that were given away this week and last, but the execution is appalling. For starters, the controls are the most unintuitive that I've ever had to use in a platformer. The keys are redefinable, but that doesn't change the triangular jumping, or the fact that your character stops every time that you attack. If you go near a bat, it will fly maniacally back and forth. If you don't kill it, it will push you everywhere that it flies. There are few things more annoying than that, but there are. For example, it's an incredible feat to be able to jump off of the edge of one platform onto another. You think that you're at the edge, but when you jump, you just fall down - even though you were touching the edge. This, coupled with the sheer size of the levels, and their designs, which constantly force you to do the same basic tasks over and over again, make it the antithesis of what a platformer should be.
The graphics are nice - for 1998. Three different art styles are used in each level: cartoony drawings for the dwarves, odd-looking Photoshop collages for the tiles, and low-definition 3D models for the enemies. None are particularly well-done. The tiles' edges don't even line up! If I called this amateurish, I'd be insulting amateurs.
The sound is similarly dismal. Take Magnussoft's bland sound effects and add dull ambient techno, and you have Brave Dwarves: Back for Treasures. Needless to say, it isn't particularly likeable in any way.
The basic story is that the portal between the dwarf world and some other place(maybe Hell, like in Doom) has been opened and treasures are required to fix it. If the stupid story wasn't bad enough, they included walking skeletons as enemies, maybe to be a bit more mainstream(read: hopelessly generic). The techno music doesn't fit in, either.
Overall, I give Brave Dwarves: Back for Treasures (set 5) a score of three and a half out of ten(three for gameplay, four for graphics, four for sound, and three for theme). It could have been half decent, but it's simply botched.
Small side notes:
When the game is run, it shows a splash screen with the message: "Press any key to continue". Why should I have to do anything to get to the main menu? The menu itself, by the way, is awful.
Couldn't they just call this Version 5.0 or something? "Set 5" makes it sound like an expansion pack.