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The Norse Kingdom is under threat from Hel, the goddess of Nifiheim, and has a mighty legion of demons to set traps and hurl weapons. The gods swiftly decide this is a job for Thor, the old hammer-swinger himself…
The kingdom is split into four lands, each a single load, which are completed by collecting all the pieces of a key and going through the door at the level’s end.
Scrolling is flick screen, allowing each screen to have its own distinct puzzles and villains: Thor can carry two weapons, starting off with fireballs and a hammer, which can be swapped for different ones later on. He can also carry two potions, which can restore energy and create magical platforms to jump on – avoiding traps.



This reminds me too much of Film Planning to be enjoyable! But seriously, despite some attractive characterful graphics the gameplay is very 8-bit – strange then that there won’t be a C64 conversion. Despite the inclusion of various weapons and potions, there isn’t much to think about: the action is pretty straightforward, the main difficulty coming in the form of cruel traps. I’m afraid Fire and Brimstone isn’t half as exiting as the title suggests.


There’s nothing like a bit of fire and brimstone to remind me of home, but even I was a little daunted by the hellish difficulty of this aardvark. Each level is packed with nasty traps, many sprung so fast it’s virtually impossible to react. This makes for much frustration at first. Although working out the solutions provides plenty of satisfaction eventually, the game is never completely addictive. The graphics are nice to look at but hardly awesome, and the FX are mediocre. Four levels aren’t that much either: we’ve already completed level one. At £15 this would be good fun, but for £25 it’s disappointing.

6 4
There are no plans for a C64 version.
U P D A T E

PRESENTATION 66%
Okay intro section, ability to continue from a new level once reached.
GRAPHICS 70%
Imaginative but unspectacular with flick screen scrolling.
SOUND 68%
Good intro tune, but dull in-game FX.
HOOKABILITY 70%
Tough and frustrating to begin with, though level one soon becomes enjoyable as the solution becomes apparent...
LASTABILITY 64%
...but later levels are more irritating and there aren’t that many of them.
OVERALL
69%
A competent aardvark, but lacking anything new.

Who came up with the idea for this game?

I think this one was quite a group effort - Steve, Tim Coupe and myself. Tim was the main programmer this time around.

Was this another Atari ST original game converted to the Amiga?

I'm afraid so :) ...I was really itching to do a proper Amiga project by this time, and I found it especially frustrating that we were making this one as a static screen game when I really wanted to see it scroll...

The graphics have a style quite reminiscent of Ghosts'n Goblins or the sequel Ghouls'n Ghosts. Was that deliberate or it just turned out that way?

Absolutely! I had always been a fan of Ghost'n'Goblins and having only seen a few screenshots in a magazine of the (soon to launch) arcade sequel, I already knew Ghouls'n'Ghosts had a look that I really wanted to emulate.

Did you have artistic licence to come up with the characters or were they all decided in advance and you just drew them?

I had complete free licence to come up with characters although I recall spending much more time working on background art than on characters - perhaps a mistake in hindsight.

Most magazine reviews gave the graphics very high scores at the time (80-90%). Did you feel that was your best work up until that point?

It probably was. I think I tried to do a little too much with the limited palette (e.g. the super detailed background scenes distracted from the foreground), but at the time I was fairly happy with the end result.

The difficulty level on this seems rather high! For example, if you accidentally press fire on the first screen and throw a weapon at the troll, you are killed! Did you ever feel that it was a bit of a waste of your graphical talent if most people couldn't complete more than a couple of screens?

Another case of 'tuned by the developers for the developers' although the game was deliberately mapped to have a flow more akin to a puzzle based adventure than an action platformer. As for feeling that effort was wasted for later levels, I never really thought about it that way at the time, but I've absolutely come to think like that over the years... It's funny how perception back then was that 'challenge = fun' and so many games (Ghouls'n'Ghosts being a perfect example itself) were so brutally difficult.

I think with Fire and Brimstone the bigger problem was that there weren't any sufficiently fun central mechanics to force that 'just one more go' principle upon which games like G'n'G thrived.