Ain't got nothing on the cavemen Ninja, Joe 'n Mac.
And my run through SNES-to-GBA ports continues with yet
another euro-platformer,
Prehistorik Man. In this one you play as Sam, a caveman hoping to aid his fellow tribesmen in gathering food and bones to survive. It
translates into a lot of jumping and club-smashing.
As any euro-platformer worth its salt, Prehistorik Man is all about jumping through huge levels, collecting all sorts of items, all worth a different amount of points. There's a bit of a
twist in that not all stages are about going left-to-right, so some missions may task you with collecting four items before reaching the end or defeating a specific enemy. The game has 23 basic stages and about 5 bonus stages, although one stage from the original SNES game was
axed for unknown reasons. There are also a few
variety stages, like flying a glider, to break up the pace.
The controls are simple, B attacks with your club, although every now and then you'll find limited-use weapons such as axes, spears(which
double as platforms!) or even flying dinosaur projectiles. A jumps, and you can, and sometimes
must, bounce on enemies' heads to reach higher platforms. Collision detection is a bit
iffy at times, so you might get hurt when jumping on top of an enemy instead of the other way around. There's also this really weird mechanic which makes it so that if Sam falls from a certain height he will bounce on the ground, which can throw you off and ruin your jumping. Doesn't help that the game is quite slippery as it is. As for the height which produces a bounce... it almost seems random, since sometimes I wouldn't bounce on the floor even though it
looked like I fell from a high enough height. Sam can dash by holding up on the D-pad, which is very weird but isn't as uncomfortable as it sounds, and you've also got a Shout, which recharges with time, that kills any nearby enemy and can
save your skin if you get overwhelmed.
Collecting bones is a must, since that is your
currency. If you explore, and if you're
lucky, you may find a Store, in which you can buy extra lives, continues,
useless hints or the
right to a password. That's right, saving the game depends on finding a store, having enough bones and writing down a password.
Lame. It seems like passwords don't remember your life count, but remember your continue count and if you've
found any max health upgrade.
While some stages are fun, particularly the early one, the latter stages become a drag. In some instances, it became a chore having to
explore every single nook and cranny for a specific item in order to progress. Heck, sometimes it felt like the only way to discover whatever I needed was to make a long-jump either left or right and hope to fall onto a platform and, hopefully, an area I hadn't found yet. Particularly bland stages were the one in which you had to find two keys in order to save an NPC, the one in which you had to collect four pages before reaching the end(This one was a
nightmare) and the second-to-last stage which require memorizing ghost patterns, it wasn't hard, just
boring. I think the first 10 stages in the game are actually fun, with silly objectives such as riding an upwards wind draft, but the second 10 stages were
labyrinthine messes that were a chore to play through.
Prehistorik Man is a weird one, because it has some really fun stages, but some really
awful ones. Regardless of how much fun the game
can be, it feels too slippery and the bouncing 'feature' only adds unfair deaths to the game. The SNES and GBA both are home to
top-of-the-line 2-D platform games, with a few shared games like Super Mario World, so there's no reason to bother with this one.
5.5 out of 10
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