This is our game recommendation letter. Take it to your retailer, tell ’em Fendo sent ya.
Drill Dozer is the subject of our first Infendo Rec Letter. What’s great about this gem is that it’s a present day platformer with its old school roots firmly in the soil. It has a retro difficulty that instantly reminded me of the NES Megaman games, but blended with a very modern feel. It even has a gizmo gadgetry atmosphere similar to MM. The art direction is on point. I’m surprised Inspector Gadget wasn’t the final boss.
The drill makes this game unique. You use it to do almost everything, from turning screws to fighting enemies (great boss fights, by the way) to drilling your way through tunnels as a form of travel. It drills in reverse as well, so you can imagine some of the puzzles. Jill, the protagonist, works for a crew of thieves and therefore has lots of secret areas to explore and treasures to find. None of the treasures do anything by themselves, but once you get all of them, you unlock some useful items. The best unlockables are actually the secret areas you can purchase maps of, since you get to do more pillaging there.
Most of the fun is had with the platforming because the level designs border on brilliance. They are so clever that you might get frustrated, once or twice. You get to experience the best levels and areas only after the story is done. The story itself is one of the shortest and weakest i’ve seen, even for a GBA game. When it ends, there’s still about 40% of the game left to explore and plunder (explunder?). But like i said, that’s not what matters here. This is a straight-up, hardcore platformer that’s intelligent, stylish and fresh. Did i mention it rumbles?