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Title Trolls AGA
Game Type Platform
Publisher Flair Software, 1994
Compatibility All AGA (With Patch)
HD Installable Yes (With Patch)
Submission Paul Matthes

Review
As part of the "Race & Chase" 1200 pack, Trolls managed to find it's way
into most AGA gamers collections. It certainly made good sense to bundle
a new AGA enhanced title to show off the capabilities of Commodore's new
baby.

Published by Flair Software, Trolls was a platform game featuring those
god awful trolls familiar to anyone who has ever been to Scandinavia.
Luckily for those of us who are not fans of those grotesque, purple-haired
novelty key-ring mascots, Trolls turned out to be a very good game
indeed.

Anyway, on with the review. The plot had something to do with you having
to rescue a number of baby trolls from each level before you can be
rescued by a flying pig (!) and thus progress to the next stage. Once all
the stages are complete, you are then able to select your own next level
of your choice until you have completed the game.

Upon loading you were presented with a nice intro sequence featuring the
trolls coming to life in a toy shop before having to input text from the
game manual to get through the copy protection. This last point was a tad
irksome as this type of copy protection had fallen out of favour by 1994
and it can be a pain trying to locate "word 5, line 6 paragraph 2" each
time.

Once past the copy protection you are faced with what must be the most
psychedelic loading screen ever! Lots of colour cycled fractals certainly
did nothing for the eyesight! Once the game has loaded and your eyes had
re-adjusted, you could select your level by moving your Troll character
around a small "mini-level". A nice touch as it not only familiarised you
with the controls, but also allowed you to skip some of the trickier
levels until you had saved up some extra lives. Also present were a
number of bonus levels where you could find extra lives or other goodies,
but these could only be entered once you had completed a level of the
game.

The game graphics were extremely well drawn and a great showcase for AGA,
as the game levels are nicely drawn with well animated sprites. A bit of
variety was added with a nice underwater level requiring you to swim
around and collect air bubbles in order to stay alive, but the levels were
all sufficiently different to prevent you from getting bored. Each of the
levels featured different baddies, from the underwater level's fish and
submarines to the Toy level's soldiers, the selection of enemies was
varied and colourful.

Another nice touch was the inclusion of various power ups to either give
you wings so that you could fly, special trainers so that you could jump
farther or a yo-yo to kill nasties from a safe distance. However, not all
power ups were beneficial as a ball and chain would slow you down, and
collecting beer would make the character difficult to control for a short
time. Locating an Elephant would allow you to restart the level from this
point should you lose a life, certainly much more imaginative than a save
game option!

Once you had managed to find and rescue the minimum amount of baby trolls
to complete the level, you were given the instruction "Find the Pigstop".
Once found, you would jump aboard a flying pig and on to the next level.

Trolls is certainly a worthwhile inclusion in anyone's collection,
particularly if you are a fan of platform games. However, I strongly
suspect that the programming team had been overdoing the hallucinogenic
substances judging by the colourful graphics and surreal touches!