Loderunner review
by: DumJT - 20th June 2003
Link: http://www.ballshooter.com/

What, no Wile E Coyote?
OK, aside from a tenuously similar sounding name, Lode Runner from Ball Shooter Games (www.ballshooter.com) bears very little resemblance to the slightly more familiar cartoon featuring everyone’s favourite land-fettered cuckoo. Well, that and the endless running away… Because you do a lot of running in Lode Runner, hence the obvious ‘Runner’ connotations of the game’s name. Running, climbing and a bit of tactical thinking. Sounds promising, if a little derivative. So, what’s on offer?

Available as a feature-restricted 4 level shareware version or the registered 20 level version that we are reviewing here, this is a PPC conversion of a fairly old arcade platform puzzler that probably enjoyed its best, if not most popular incarnation when released by Sierra for the PC, complete with a ridiculously simple and highly satisfying level designer. 

The objective of the game is simple; guide your character, a ‘treasure hunter’ according to the in-game help document, through the 20 increasingly hard platform & ladder levels, collecting all the gold gems in each level to enable progress to the next. To make your task a little harder, not only do the later levels become quite fiendish in their design but from level 2 onwards you have at least one relentless robe-clad rivals to repel, and that’s a nifty bit of alliteration if I say so myself.

Each level is a single screen, so if you come to this game from playing a game with a similar concept like Toki Tori, where a level could span considerably more than the height and width of the screen, Lode Runner will seem quite primitive. The platforms and ladders themselves are as basic in appearance and functionality as you can get, reminding me of the graphic style, if not the frenetic action, of Chuckie Egg. (As a side note, it would be great if Ball Shooter could port that classic to the PPC). 
As well as platforms to run along and ladders to climb, there are also overhead traversing ropes that the player, and his enemies, can swing along, hand-over-hand style. Scattered around each level, usually in the least accessible places, are the staple reward of this type of platform game – ambiguous gold blocks. Not only does collecting these gems increase your score, but all of them need to be collected to clear a level. This is the kind of non-rocket-science platform-game design that should require no further explanation! The only variation when collecting all the gems is that sometimes this enables a portal to appear, which the player has to walk into, and other times the next level just loads automatically when the last gem is collected.

The player character is controlled with the directional control pad and/or the stylus. What you will find, in practice, is that a combination of the two methods is quite useful, in fact top marks to Ball Shooter for incorporating both types of control in this way. If you tap the stylus anywhere on the screen that is reachable by your character, the path-finding AI (similar to that used by the enemies when tracking the player) will be used by the player character to take the shortest route to the point selected. For example, on the first level, you can click the final gem half way up the right side of the screen and the player character, without further player input, will make its way around the screen, automatically collecting the other gems he walks over until he reaches the final one. Taking control with the directional pad is useful for the majority of the time, when the situation is constantly changing, such as when a couple of robed enemies are running all over the place trying to catch you. 

When pursued by one or more of the anonymous robed enemies, the player has two options – run away or dig a hole to temporarily trap them. Hole digging is simple; click a button or tap the platform at the desired location with the stylus. You can only dig at the next adjacent platform ‘block’ to the left or right of your character’s current position. The Help document states that you can dig through a ‘wall’ but they actually mean ‘floor’. Digging is instantaneous, the hole magically appearing for no apparent reason as soon as you click/tap the desired location. In other versions of the game this is visually represented by some graphical effect, for example a kind of green plasma ray on the PC version that seemed to ‘melt’ the platform at the desired location. Beware that enemies can climb out of holes after a short period of time, unlike the player. If you fall in one of your own holes you will need to reset the level and not be so clumsy next time! Either that, or you can wait until the hole fills itself in and you die. The key, then, is timing. If an enemy falls in a hole some time after it was dug, there is a good chance that the hole will fill in and eliminate the enemy before he can pull himself out of it. However, any enemy removed in this way will re-spawn, usually at the least opportune moment. Digging holes not only traps enemies but can be used to create a temporary route to an inaccessible area below the platform that the player is on. Be warned, it is possible to drop your character through a hole into an area from which he cannot then escape. The only option then is to reset the level. Sometimes the platform cannot be dug through, usually in palces where you wish it could be! These unbreakable platforms are shown as grey bricks – the normal ‘diggable’ platforms are red brick.

http://www.pdacorps.com/default.asp?key=pages/loderunner.htm