As the title says, a review has surfaced of a very obscure Lemmings clone, for an equally obscure handheld games system. I just saw the video and figured that I'd post about it here.
The game is called Ant-Soldiers, and it was originally released for the
Mega Duck handheld. This is a "Hong Kong Original" Game Boy-wannabe console which debuted in 1993, and it actually pre-dates the similarly-wackily-named Bandai WonderSwan by quite a number of years. I'd never heard of the game before now, though I did know of the Mega Duck console itself, as I'm quite fond of obscure handhelds. It's pretty much the only Lemmings clone I've seen that uses a fairly logical choice of species for its mascots, since ants happen to follow each other and all that.
It was reviewed
in this part of this video.
Ant-Soldiers seems to be a decently-competent Lemmings clone, at least going by what's shown, though the music isn't great - it just sounds like the sort of generic bloopy nonsense that you tend to hear in bootleg NES games (though, there is a reason for that - see below). It gets extra points for having
quite appealing promotional artwork on the cartridge label (which would have been the same on the packaging, too), as a lot of Lemmings wannabes seem to skip this part, even though the cuteness (of course, contrasted against the grim deaths) is kind of a part of the series' charm.
From what I can find, it seems that it was developed by
Thin Chen Enterprise, who are probably better known as Sachen - a company that made a lot of unlicensed games for a variety of consoles, though they were most prolific on the Famicom/NES, and the Game Boy. Apparently, much of their Mega Duck output was ported to the Game Boy, and
Ant-Soldiers was one of the games so ported, both as an unlicensed single-game cartridge, and as part of a later series of 4-in-1 compilations.
I don't know whether Ant-Soldiers apes Lemmings all the way through, or if it deviates into unique level designs later on. Aside from confirmation of its existence, there doesn't appear to be a huge amount of written information about it out there.
Anyway, there you have it. Ant-Soldiers. It's a mildly interesting little oddity, and yet another one for the big list of Lemmings knock-offs.