Lemmings Revolution - you spin me right round baby round round...

I have fonder gaming memories of Lemmings than almost any other game. Some of the levels would have you screaming in frustration as your planning or timing was fractionally out, making the level impossible to complete; however the feeling of accomplishment when your little green-haired friends made it safely to the exit was more gratifying than most games could ever dream of achieving. I never really got into Lemmings 2 and Lemmings 3D just seemed like a doomed idea from the start. Lemmings Revolution takes the classic game concept and, via the Lemmings having reached their promised land but been kidnapped by weasels who view them as entertainment, have a series of cylindrical obstacle courses to overcome.

Each level (there are 200+ of them) is based on a cylinder, and using the mouse and right mouse button, you can spin round to see the rest of the course. This idea actually works quite well, though it does have the unfortunate consequence of making all the levels seem rather small and of the same size as all the other levels. Each level has various hazards that need to be negotiated by means of blockers (who won’t let other Lemmings past), climbers, parachutists, diggers, bashers, miners, etc. The levels are quite well designed, some seem nearly impossible without some serious lateral thinking. Probably the best thing about this game (apart from the Lemmings looking almost identical to those in the original game) is the way you progress through the levels; you have three starting levels, and from each one of those you can progress to two more. If a level is proving too tricky, you can go out and try the other one. If necessary you can even go back to one of the other starting levels and open up more levels. This adds variety and decreases frustration when you can’t get past a particular level.

Control is entirely with the mouse, using a simple interface (click on the lemming type, then click on the lemming you want to turn into that type) – it works fine but sometimes the game doesn’t seem to register your click on the lemming type, which can result in disaster for your level! This is very occasionally and could of course theoretically be a problem with my mouse (not that I’m aware of one). I would have preferred the traditional bottom of the screen icon list as opposed to where it is on the left, but it’s not a major issue. The icons at the top right showing how many lemmings have been released onto the screen and how many have escaped so far are plain black and very difficult to see; I am taking this as a glitch or issue with Vista / my graphics drivers, as I can’t imagine it’s been done by design.

The graphics are so-so – they do the job, but that’s it. Unfortunately there are a number of graphical glitches present, some of them affecting the menu screen (black text on a black background is strangely difficult to read!), but the more serious of these tend to resolve after you’ve gone in and out of the game screen, and the others are more annoyances than game-stoppers. The sound in the video sequences (these don’t seem to work in Vista unless you run the program in Windows 95/98/XP compatibility mode) is okay, cheesy voice-acting, fun music. Whatever I tried I couldn’t get the in-game sound effects to work. I’m not sure how much this affected my enjoyment of the game – these days I’m quite used to keeping the sound turned off to avoid disturbing other people (damn them! :-D) The game itself worked fine so it wasn’t too much of a problem.

Compared to the original, though, something is definitely missing here – though there are some good features to the game and it remains true to the spirit of the original, it just didn’t seem as fulfilling. The game is a good mental challenge and I recommend it as such, and I’m aware that my nostalgia of the original may cloud my thinking here, but this doesn’t come across as more than an average game. I guess the lack of variety in terms of the level design is quite a major problem, and the graphical bugs do get annoying. I will definitely be coming back to this game from time to time in order to complete the trickier levels, though. Lemmings Revolution is still, all in all, a good game and worth playing, but don’t expect a classic.

PEGI Rating: 3+
Released (as a budget title) by Dice Multimedia, developed by Psygnosis.

System Specs:

Windows 95/98/XP (ran on Vista with the problems mentioned above)
CPU: Pentium 166MHz
RAM: 32Mb
HDD Space: 5Mb
Graphics card: 4Mb
DirectX: 7.0
If anyone has this and plays it under a different OS to Vista, please leave a comment on whether you’ve had the same problems as mentioned in my review. Thanks.

The game can run in the following languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian.

For screenshots of Lemmings Revolution please visit my gaming blog at http://captaind-pc-gaming.blogspot.com/2008/08/lemmings-revolution-review.html - sadly Epinions does not yet have hte functionality to post screenshots.


Lemmings was one of my Top 100 Computer Games of All Time

Team 17, the legendary game developers (especially in the Amiga world) were also behind the similar but strangely opposite Worms games – the best of these to my mind (or at least, what's left of it) is Worms Armageddon. Oddly enough, whereas Lemmings 3D always seemed just wrong, the 3D version of worms worked quite well. It is called, strangely enough, Worms 3D.