Obviously, it’s not going to test your next generation console, but it looks far better than the Amiga version. The animations are fairly smooth, and each stage is colourful and bright. Other than these general design issues, though, the visuals themselves are quite nice. It’s interesting, but it serves as a sign of the game’s age, and while older players may get a kick out of the wackiness, looked upon from a modern context it’s not nearly as crazy or as fun as you may remember. You’ll come across cats in army boots, frogs, carrots with pistols, wizards, missile-toting knights, and more. Even the collectibles and enemies are completely random. Each area is built around the various locations of the red putties, not around any real theme. There’s no real structure to any of them. It doesn’t help that the levels are a bit of a mess in the first place.
This shouldn’t be a problem that’s occurring in a modern game on the PS4. Sometimes, this will pay off – and other times you’ll fall and will need to make your way back up again. Otherwise, you’ll have to just jump and hope for the best. This is often nullified by the stretch move, which lets you reach up and down to other platforms that’d usually be out of your grasp – but only if there’s a podium directly underneath the one that you’re trying to grab onto. It would be impossible to play this game without the brightness set just right, and even then you’ll probably still stumble upon a problem or two. Exploring is made all the harder thanks to the odd layers in each stage that sometimes make you doubt what you can actually stand on. The design is such that you won’t often be able to dodge these sections, but that shouldn’t prove too much of a problem, as it’s the levels themselves that are against you. Platformer fans will tell you that there’s a natural feeling to the best entries in the genre, a ‘tightness’ that gives you control over your character, but that just doesn’t appear to be present here.
It’s endlessly annoying to have to time a leap just right, and then to fall two or three levels downwards because you hit the jump button when you were too close to the edge of a ledge. The title’s most annoying moments will come from the disparity between what you want your putty to do and what he’ll actually do. You’ll occasionally be blocked by enemies that move both left and right (and sometimes even upwards), but for the most part there’s nothing too challenging outside of the act of actually exploring everything. The gameplay is simple: as a little blue blob of putty, you must collect all of the red splodges of goo and hurry to the green door that appears. It’s surprising, then, that this revamped PlayStation 4 version does little to stretch above and beyond its retro roots. Jump forward 15 years, and we no longer get excited by shapes (unless they’re naughty shapes and you’re a member of Reddit), or game logic. We’ve seen that often even with the most famous of games, and so it’s not too surprising to find that this much more obscure one is barely worth remembering at all.Back in the nineties, the eventually unreleased Amiga version of Putty Squad was praised by the press for its varied level shapes, consistent game logic, and “masterful” animation. There’s also the not inconsiderable problem that this is absurdly expensive for what at a few pounds would have been an interesting curio but at over £15 is simply an expensive reminder of how badly many retro games survive the passage of time. It also makes the optional challenge mode, where you’re tasked with completing levels under certain conditions – such as not collecting any food, seem especially tough and unfair. Although the levels eschews the simple left-to-right structure of most platformers of the era they lack the sense of progression and tighter design that would’ve brought.Īnd although the amount of effort that’s gone into recreating the original graphics in HD form is laudable the end result is a garish mess that often makes it very difficult to spot either Putty or his enemies.Īs a result the game, and your progress through it, feels random and far too reliant on luck rather than judgement. On top of this collecting stars gradually increases the power and range of your standard attacks until you can wipe out almost the whole screen at once.īut while Putty certainly has a lot of tricks up his doughy sleeves the context in which they’re used never seems halfway near as interesting.
Things get even more Kirby-esque when you start absorbing power-ups to gain new abilities, such as time-delayed bombs and a tin of cat food to call in a giant cat called Dweezil (the villain from the original game) to help you out.
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