New Adventure Island (1992)
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New Adventure Island Review
New Adventure Island is a 1992 side-scrolling platform game by Hudson Soft. It is a pretty good, but not great platformer.
This is actually one of my childhood favorites, but a game which is not as great today as it was to me when I was a kid. It is still good, but not great. So the story is non-existent and your typical “boy needs to rescue a princess” platform setup. The animation and the graphics are pretty good and the character design of the protagonist is pretty solid. I loved his islander look which was refreshing and the setting of the game was well explored.
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The score is excellent and I really enjoyed those themes not only in the credits and opening, but also in the levels themselves, very moody and accompanying each level so well. It is a typical early 90s platformer soundtrack, but the one done really well nonetheless.
In terms of gameplay, I really liked it despite it being overly short. It consists of just six worlds and each one has four levels. The last one usually featured a boss fight but you have to clear the entire level before fighting the boss and once you lose, you have to do that all over again. I liked that as it made those last levels more demanding. The bosses themselves were, I have to say, pretty easy and although well designed, the levels were the bigger challenge for me.
Some of the highlights include the ice level which was appropriately slippery and thus pretty interesting. Those island levels by the water were by far the most difficult ones for me as they employed the sharks and such creatures so well. And the desert levels were pretty hard in their own right.
Speaking of those creatures, the A.I. is actually very strong in New Adventure Island and stronger than the bosses themselves in my opinion. The snakes were tough and annoying and the frogs could be frustrating at times. I also really liked those more rare animals such as birds and ostriches, all really well utilized within the gameplay.
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So I really enjoyed playing this game that now I would like to look into the rest of the entries in the Adventure Island series. But even though I loved this game as a kid, I definitely have to talk about its flaws too. It is overly short, it could be beaten pretty fast and in my opinion the level design was not the greatest and sometimes it was quite uninventive and repetitive.
New Adventure Island is one of my childhood favorite games with overly short length and repetitive gameplay, but it is pretty fun to play, the A.I. is solidly demanding and the graphics and score are both very good. It is a good and entertaining platformer, but a flawed one nonetheless.
