The Week In Games: Firetop Adventure

Firetop Adventure is yet another platform scroller (seems like there's been a lot of those lately). This time the story is a little spooky: your job is to root out an evil entity that's turning harmless creatures into hideous monsters. Although FA is still a little cartoonish, it does have an advantage over its purely run-and-jump competition in that it gives you weapons against enemies, lets you blast through walls with bombs (my favorite), and has some interesting puzzles.

The levels are also pretty well designed and have a good flow: FA isn't one of those games that was just slapped together. Still, the graphics don't seem to go beyond what we had in the early 1990s. I've noticed this in most of the platform scroller games that have been released for the Pocket PC.

The only one of these games that ever wowed me graphically was Rayman Ultimate for Pocket PC, a title which came out years ago and is long gone from the market. While FA is good all the way around, it's not exceptional and perhaps doesn't really do enough to stand out from this ever-larger category.
Well, it does have one thing: it has a very reasonable price tag of $4.95.