Superfrog HDSuperfrog HD is 2D platformer where you play drugged-up formerly-prince super frog hunting down the Witch that had hexed you. Unlike the recent trend in this genre, the plot is completely irrelevant so let us move on. This is actually a reboot of 16-bit Amiga game in 1993 by Team17 (noted for Worms series), and involve complete re-work of all the stages instead of being simple graphical port. I've never played the original, so I'll judge the game solely on its own merits.
The gameplay is pretty basic - you just have to reach end of the stage. Along the way you'll find power-ups (upper left: wings that keep you afloat after jumping and green thing that you can toss like boomerang when on the ground) that you only lose upon losing all health, and items with more temporary effects such as movement speed altercation and invincibility-against-monsters. You can step on
some enemies to kill them but you'd be better off using green thing instead, as hitbox can be unreliable.
What immediately stood out to me is the expansive stage design. There's lots of secret pathways which reveal themselves only when you stand adjacent to them, and World 1 had multiple ways to reach the goal although World 2 was significantly less "open-ended". Regardless, secret pathways are clearly one of the major tenets in Superfrog HD stage design as the score screen at end of the stage actually counts how many had been found.
It is therefore disappointing that through exploration generally do not lead to tangible rewards. Sometimes you can bypass difficult segment, but usually they exist only for power-ups that no longer matters once collected (in fact, since power-ups are lost upon death, I wish you did not "eat" already collected power-ups so that I can pick them up later if needed) and score.
Actually, score is presented in two forms: coin and fruit. At end of every stage, you roll a slot machine that can unlock additional stages. The game claims that amount of fruits you collect decide how many times you can roll this aptly titled "Fruit machine"; I'd explored one stage pretty throughly and simply focused on beating the level in another, yet I always ended up with 3 coins only so either the game is lying or these fruits are not significant enough.
Graphic and sound is not impressive, but workable. However I'd say there are some visibility issues. See those two puny blue things on my screenshot above? That's an enemy. While most enemies are large enough to be clearly visible, there seem to be few that are deliberately designed to be less noticeable size- and/or colour-wise. Your character can actually move around pretty fast so they can be quite irritating. Perhaps I can accept the viability of having small annoying enemies, but take a loot at this:
It took me a bit to understand there were actually stone platforms present. No, they are not secrets. Did I also mention somewhere that hitbox can be unreliable by the way?
Actually enemies are not big threat in this game, small or not. You can take several hits, and special items such as full health are fairly common. I don't think I ever died from a monster. All generosity ends when it comes to spikes and their cousins however - they're one hit kill, and is what jacks up Superfrog HD's difficulty. I breezed through World 1 and was fairly confident entering the Castle, only to be confronted by sudden increase in number of spikes present. Up to 2-3 it was all fine and looked like appropriate increase in difficulty, but then 2-4 suddenly increased the stakes by introducing leaps of faith: you need to land on aforementioned small stone platform (that you cannot see) otherwise you'll be spiked. I'm no hardcore platformer nor could I find anything noteworthy in this game to keep persisting, so I quit after having several deaths at that location.
Verdict: mediocreP.S. I looked up the boss fights as the first one was quite uninspiring, and they all involve
The Witch twirling around in same way like dumb-dumb.
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