As we all know, the PS Vita game, Lemmings Touch - the first new Lemmings installment in quite a few years - has finally been released.
I grabbed it quite literally as soon as it was added to the UK PlayStation Store earlier, as I was waiting and refreshing constantly until it appeared!
I've got a couple of hours with the game under my belt, now (I've completed the Tutorial levels, and "Easy" - which is what's replaced Fun - and I'm currently a bit of the way into Tricky). What follows are my impressions so far.
The GoodLemmings Touch is insanely well-polished and lovingly-created; It's blindingly obvious that it's been made by people who care about the series, and the developers, d3t, absolutely must be commended for this. In that regard, this is the game that I'd hoped for for a very long time - it's really how the series should have been treated from the moment Sony fully absorbed Psygnosis' operations into Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, instead of just letting a very well-known series fall into obscurity as they did.
The new additions - both the interactive-object mechanics (i.e., the movable blocks and platforms, and, whilst not new to the series, the significantly-altered-for-this-game cannons and trampolines), and the very endearing Mischievous Lemmings - work pretty well, and change up the dynamic a fair bit, as does the one/two/three-star grading system used to mark your performance in the levels (this is used to unlock the entirety of the game's levels as you go along, so it's a good idea to get into the habit of getting three stars for each level from the get-go). To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time properly new mechanics have been added to the series since Lemmings Revolution way back in 2000, and it all adds together to keep the pace nice and quick. The game is perfectly suited to being on a handheld console, as its design lends itself equally well to playing for both minutes or hours.
The controls feel right. I was a bit skeptical when I first heard about the game, but they actually do work pretty well. There are some issues, but I'll get to those later.
Due to the control method used (which involves picking a Lemming first and tapping him to pop up the skills menu, which will remain on-screen and directing this specific lemming until it's dismissed; You then tap skills as and when they're needed), Lemmings Touch's focus seems to be on execution-heavy puzzles. You know the ones - the kind where you've got to get things just right, and where the designers have not been overly generous (or usually not in any way generous at all) with the amount of skills at your disposal. If you're fond of these types of Lemmings puzzles (as opposed to, say, the multi-tasking heavy ones, which just don't seem to be possible in this format), then you'll probably like Lemmings Touch a lot.
The game retains some niceties from the PSP version, such as the visible helmets and umbrellas so that you can see at a glance which lemmings have been assigned Climber and Floater skills. These remain as handy as they were before.
There's bags of character in the game, too - the detail in the landscapes and the lovable animations effortlessly evokes the series' past glories (reminding me particularly fondly of both the original Lemmings, and Lemmings 3D). (EDIT: Also, a nice touch is that the game's background planes shift if you move the console around during play. It even does this on the title screen.)
Just look at this Candy Land level screenshot, for example. There's even writing running down the middles of the sticks of rock, as is typical of such sweets in the UK. This, in particular, reminded me of Lemmings 3D (which I suppose it would, since that's the only other Lemmings game that I know of to feature sweets-themed levels), and caused a great big smile.
The Lemmings also look arguably cuter and cuddlier than they have ever looked during the "Sony Era". I never liked the design implemented with the promotional artwork of the PSP version - I always thought that it made our fair rodents look like freaky, beaky bird-people. There have been some tweaks to that look for Lemmings Touch, though, and I think the game's visuals are all the better for it (it's human nature for unappealing-looking characters to be off-putting, after all).
Also, I don't know if it's a genuine reference or just a coincidence (I actually suspect the former, for reasons I'll explain in a moment), but we also see a return of the lemming-head coins first (and last) seen in Lomax. They have an actual use as in-game currency this time - you earn them by pulling off often-ridiculous tasks, and they're used to "buy" various costume items and colour-customisations so that you can tweak the look of your in-game lemmings. (The PS Vita's system-wide screenshot capability brings this otherwise-superficial feature into its own, as it lets you capture these tweaks so that you can use them as avatars or whatever.)
Speaking of Lomax, try flicking your eyes between these two screenshots quickly;
I'm sure this isn't just me: The Mischievous Lemmings (placed on the pre-level screens to show how many of each type of lemming will be in a level) really do seem to be channelling a fair bit of Evil Ed, there, don't they?
The Mischievous Lemmings also keep shoving and glaring at the regular lemmings every-so-often, too, which nets a shrug from the good guys. I find this both cute and amusing.
Like I said, they're really endearing, which has surprised me, as the reaction I initially had to their appearance at the end of the original trailer in September 2013 was "Oh dear...", followed quickly by, "... These guys look like some sort of awful effort to try to sell Lemmings to people who would never buy it anyway...". A brilliant lesson in not judging a book (in this case, over-the-top advertising renders) by its cover!
Unfortunately, their endearing nature leads to a down-point, which I'll get to shortly.
This brings me neatly on to...
The BadA bug, identical to one in the PSP Lemmings game, regarding Walkers passing through Blockers, exists in this game. It seems to be most noticable in level(s?) brought over from the PSP version where this issue reared its head originally. I have no idea why this is present, though - d3t did not develop the PSP version of Lemmings, and though they were the ones who ported it to mobile phones years later, I don't imagine that Lemmings Touch is running on that same game engine. This is only a minor quibble, but one worth mentioning nonetheless, as it requires you to take extra care when placing Blockers on uneven terrain.
The skills menu will take some getting used to for long-time Lemmings players. Your instincts will want to tap skills and then tap lemmings, but this is now reversed - you must tap a lemming and then tap skills as and when they're needed, whilst not forgetting to switch to other lemmings when you need them to carry out tasks. This is not actually a bad thing, per se, but it will trip up series veterans a fair bit until you get used to it.
If you've previously played the PS Mobile port of the PSP version of Lemmings, this control method expands on that.
Sometimes, the skills menu is not as responsive as it could be, meaning that puzzles expecting you to pull off split-second skill-changes (for example, from Basher to Builder, whilst one pixel away from stepping off of a ledge that's too high for a lemming to survive falling from) are too easy to fail at, leading to repeatedly having to start again. In and of itself, this is not a fault of the game, as inaccuracy is actually an inherent flaw of capacitive touch-screens (as the PS Vita uses, the same as most mobile phones and tablets do). However, some of the puzzles impacted by this are *new ones*, not levels brought in from past games, which makes it a bit less forgivable, even bearing in mind the nature of such screens.
Speaking of levels brought in from past games, there seem to be too many of these. It was quite disconcerting to find that the first level you encounter after completing the five tutorial levels is one from the very first game! I'm now part of the way through Tricky, and there seem to have been old levels (from the original and PSP games) thrown in every one or two stages, so far. The levels showcasing the new mechanics show off the game far better (and are often more madcap and, by their very nature, novel), and are really great fun, so it's a shame that so many of these older levels dilute the new experiences so early on... This also means that I haven't yet seen the Mischievous Lemmings since their debut in the Tutorial section!
This is the down-point that I mentioned in relation to them, before - once you've played the tutorials, you're immediately left wanting to see more of the new stuff that was designed for/around this game and its controls and features.
One control aspect that's a little bit niggly at times is the selecting of the correct lemming to assign tasks to. Whilst you can hit left and right on the d-pad to move between them, if you've got huge numbers of lemmings right next to each other in a group, it can't hop between them fast enough, and you can end up losing lemmings no matter how quick on the draw you are. This can sometimes cause you to fail to achieve a three-star ranking on levels, either through wasting time, or by losing too many lemmings.
The difficulty is largely good, but sometimes gets a bit unbalanced - I found that, before I'd even left "Easy", there were levels were it was unfairly difficult to achieve a three-star ranking. Since these stars are necessary to open up all of the levels in the game as you go along, this can become a little frustrating and annoying when it crops up.
And, for the last bad point (well, it's more an interconnected set of them), this game's platform is unfortunately not going to help it in the long-run. Though one would rightly expect a lot of touch-screen usage in a game by the name of Lemmings Touch, the early promotional writings for the game stated that it was built around all of the PS Vita's controls - but the final game really isn't. It just uses the touch-screen and d-pad (you can optionally use the left analogue stick to pan the camera around, but this is much more easily done using the touch-screen, which is where your fingers will usually be, anyway), and none of the system's other inputs are used (and nor are alternative control options available). The original implication that the game was built around all of the Vita's control options caused me to state in another thread recently that I couldn't see how they would be able to port this game to Android; Playing the actual game itself demonstrates that they very easily could, by either moving the lemming-selecting actions from the Vita's d-pad to on-screen buttons in Android, or even optionally to a phone or tablet's volume-rocker, which would be ideal for this.
Given this, and the fact that the screen has deliberately been kept largely uncluttered, I can see no reason why this game needs to be a PS Vita exclusive at all - as much as I like mine, the console is a dismal failure with almost no traction (I only got mine for some indie titles, a couple of franchises I've never played before which have been ported over, and Lemmings Touch, really), and this game is so good that it deserves a far bigger audience than it will ever get here. Perhaps the scenario I suggest above isn't that far-fetched, and the game maybe will see a port for a wide audience at some point? I can only hope so.
If it doesn't get such a port, I do somewhat worry for the future of the Lemmings series. It's no secret that it's been left to decay since Sony finished absorbing Psygnosis completely (until then, Psygnosis, which was the company that held the Lemmings rights after DMA Design sold them to them, was still run as a separate entity, and Lemmings still appeared on competing, non-Sony platforms), and it's also clear to many of us that famous-name games which don't get retail releases (as Lemmings Touch is not getting) often tend to fall into one of two categories that can threaten an established series - either a game that a publisher is under-confident in and don't want taking up shelf-space they could give to another game or franchise that they have more confidence in, or a series that a publisher is trying to create artificially low sales figures for so as to provide a good excuse for killing it off (something under-promoted digital-only installments in well-established franchises seem to go hand-in-hand with, from what I've seen).
I must stress that I DO NOT believe that Lemmings Touch is in either of these situations, here: The problem is that retail is still the biggest venue for games consoles and their games (if you don't believe this, it may be wise to ask yourself why no "AAA" games have ever gone digital-only
), and since Lemmings Touch isn't being released that way, it's going to escape the notice of a lot of people who might well have wanted to know about it. Even though Sony has allowed the series to suffer and decay, Lemmings still has a lot of brand-recognition (that isn't being leveraged, much to my chagrin
) among an awful lot of people who simply haven't forgotten it.
Anyway, those are my thoughts so far! I'll sum this up by saying that, if you have a PS Vita, my impression is that Lemmings Touch is really good, and a must-get. Unfortunately, given the surrounding circumstances, I have this gut feeling that even though it's just what the doctor ordered, it might be a case of "too little, too late" for both Lemmings and the PS Vita.
This said, what we really ought to be hoping for (and doubly-so considering Sony's enormous financial difficulties at this time, which is another thing that could potentially harm the series, depending on what happens to their assets should they go under), is a port to Android, as I can't see any use of the PS Vita hardware in the game that would make this unfeasible (they'd have to add in a screenshot function so that you can capture pics of your customised lemmings, I guess? That's all I can think of.
). And not exclusive to "PlayStation Approved" Android devices, either - that'd be just as fruitless as keeping it exclusive to the PS Vita. Considering that d3t ported the PSP version of Lemmings to the "PS Mobile" runtime, perhaps that notion isn't *too* far-fetched!
Anyway, yes, Lemmings Touch does great justice to our beloved series, all things considered - be sure to show it some support if you can!
