Number:205
Year:1991
Publisher:Apogee
Developer:Id Software
Genre:Side-Scroller
Difficulty:4/5
Time:3 hours 30 minutes
Won:Yes (83W/65L)
And nearly 25 games later we're back with Commander Keen. When people talk about Commander Keen, this is usually the one they're imagining. Keen traveling through a strange world, with nice shiny graphics that are still somehow EGA. Despite being EGA, I suspect this one lasted longer than the first trilogy for longer thanks to how nice it looks. These days I can tell it isn't VGA, because shareware DOS VGA games had a habit of making sure you knew that they used all 256 colors on-screen.
The Goodbye Galaxy games are a duology rather than a trilogy thanks to FormGen, who during the development of this offered Id some money and got the final game turned into a retail product. FormGen as a company basically just sold the complete versions of Apogee games in stores, so how all this came to be seems to be quite unnecessarily convoluted behind the scenes. It's also why Keen 6 isn't sold today.
Curiously, there's a figure on the development team I don't recognize, Jason Blochowiak. Apparently, he used to work at Softdisk, and lived with the boys at Id. After Wolfenstein 3D, he left to work for Apogee and a few other companies, most notably on the game God of Thunder. His real crowning achievement was Apogee's attempt at the fighting genre, Xenophage: Alien Bloodsport. You know how people talk about how cool One Must Fall 2097 was and proved that the PC could do fighting games? Xenophage was everything that OMF wasn't.
The story is, Billy Blaze, who dons his brother's football helmet to become Commander Keen, has built a faster than light radio, which picks up a terrible message. A race of aliens called the Shikadi are going to destroy the Milky Way and remake it in the name of the Gannalech. Glad to see we've gone from "aliens are going to take over one planet" to "aliens are going to destroy an untold amount of worlds through unspecified means." This seems like a big job for Commander Keen. Shouldn't he be reporting to a Admiral Sharp for this? Or is this X-COM rules? In which case, Keen needs to do some delegating.
Keen goes to Gnosticus IV, home of the Gnosticenes, guardian of the Oracle. They owe Keen a favor. I don't know why, because I would remember a weird gnostic pun. There's some comedy I can't translate well here in which Keen stuns his mother and father.
Once he's on Gnosticus, a "council page" repeats the joke about Captain Keen from Dreams, and tells Keen that the council were kidnapped and taken to the Shadowlands. Now the game begins.
Unlike in the original trilogy, Keen 4 experiences a lot more jankiness with higher resolutions. The help menu was broken, and even in-game looks janky. So I'm playing this 100% as originally intended, just through Commander Genius.
Keen controls pretty well here. A bit slow if I'm honest. Jumps have a nice meat to them and decent air control. The pogo stick trades most of your forward momentum for upward momentum, but you have to press jump to reach the full height. Combined with Keen being able to climb up ledges and you can pull off some interesting moves. Momentum is weird and it can be very tricky to pull off some of the more complex moves, even with the tricks outlined in the help section.
If need be, you can look up and down by pressing up or down. Some ledges can even be jumped straight down from by pressing jump while holding down. Including moving platforms, some of which move, some of which don't until you find a switch and some which slowly fall while you're on them. This gets into a problem with the game's collision detection. Sometimes it doesn't work like you'd expect. Keen falls off much sooner than I expect, which feels like an overcorrection for games being too generous with how far you can be off the ground. Up activates switches and enters doors, everything else is automatic.
Shooting is straightforward. Keen can shoot left, right or up. If Keen jumps and points down, he can shoot down. It's as fast as you can press the fire button. It uses ammo, but it's so generous that you will never run out. In addition to the usual points items and lives at certain points, there are "lifewater" drops, collect 100 and you get another life.
I'll be honest, being able to save, mid-level even, combined with relatively generous water drops and point items makes the lives system pointless.
Other important bits include secret passages, jump into the walls to find them, and poles. Poles go up and down, up is slow, down is faster. The secret, so secret the manual explains it, is that if you hold up and jump you go faster. You can shoot up and down on poles.
Continuing the series trend of open overworlds, Keen 4 consists of 18 levels, one of which is secret, and about 6 which aren't required to win. You basically have access to the whole map after three levels.
- Bounder, a bouncing red ball which looks a bit like a refugee from the last game. Technically a friendly, just jump on him and you can get higher than you would otherwise, even with the pogostick. Never required to get anything, thanks to how unhelpful they can be by accident sometimes.
- Poison Slug, a yellow slug which moves slowly and occasionally...excretes a green puddle that kills Keen. Both kill Keen by touch, but the slug itself is no problem...assuming you're level with it. Which you aren't as the game goes on.
Lick, a blue ball which goes around until its close to Keen, then shoots out fire. Fast up-close and tricky to hit, but if you're far away you can avoid it. - Mad Mushroom, more of an obstacle, can't be killed and does a series of jumps you have to time your way past. I don't think I ever got killed by them past their first appearance.
- Skypest, flying, hard to see pests. Often appearing mid-flight, these guys can't be shot, not that it would help considering their size. Instead, you jump on them with the pogo stick. Quite clever.
- Blue Bird, giant blue birds. They fly or walk at their leisure. Quite nasty, as Keen can only stun them. Sometimes they're only stunned for a second. They only appear twice, lucky for me.
- Mimrock, they're like those rocks in the foreground you sometimes see. Invulnerable, and only moves when Keen is looking away from them. They jump towards Keen at a certain point. Very difficult to deal with, but thankfully slow. You can shoot them, but only while they're walking. Shoot then turn around and you'll take them out.
- Treasure Eater, sinister looking enemies which are entirely harmless to you...in a sense. They take items. As such it's a very good idea to prioritize these guys when you can.
- Wormouth, worms which appear as tiny green dots, until they get close. Technically stunnable, but good luck doing that, you can only do so as they attack, which gives you little chance to stop them before they do.
- Thundercloud, it's a cloud, that shoots lightning bolts at you. Slow but invulnerable and basically completely ignorable. I think it popped up once, but I could have missed it.
- Sprite, a little devil you find underwater. Moves back and forth and occasionally shoots at you. Annoying.
- Dopefish, the legendary creature who has been an in-joke for decades. Unfortunately, only appears in a water level, so it isn't fun dealing with it. For starters, you can't shoot it, so you're running away. But you also need to get past them, firstly, you can try the risky move of rushing up to it, then swimming away, and when it opens its mouth you hope it eats one of the fish that follow you around. This doesn't work reliably. You could also just move it away from where you are by moving to someplace within its alert status, but it can't reach. It doesn't always work though.
- Berkeloid, fiery creatures that shoot fire and can't be shot. They would be dangerous if they ever appeared in situations where you had no choice but to fight them.
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| Whenever Keen dies, he makes a face and jumps like that, if you're lucky/unlucky, it ties a combo together, causing him to bounce across the screen. |
Most levels are generally pretty solid, though fail from being perfect thanks to constant reliance on killing the player with things they couldn't see. A lot of levels have those nice interconnected features, that while fun to play through, aren't really interesting to talk about.
- Perilous Pit was the first level outside of the very easy first one I entered. It's like those Dreams levels where you're in a vast pit area with two walls and some rooms on the side and an important area under the main section. It's not bad, it just feels a bit samey after Dreams. (not that you would notice in 1991) The two big changes are dashing around the poison mushrooms, proper keys and most importantly the council. On some levels there are old beareded men in red robes, find all of them and you win the game.
- Crystalus, and the game ceases to be a nice Sunday stroll. This one is the first I played with crystals, basically colored keys, except done in a novel way. It's a classic Keen labyrinth level, only harder than usual thanks to the introduction of the invulnerable blue birds. The final stretch in a narrow tunnel being particularly tight thanks to poison slugs below and a blue bird flying above.
- Chasm of Chills, you get two paths through the level. Down below is full of enemies, mostly invulnerable to your gun. Up are a series of perilous jumps and if you miss one, you're falling to the path below, probably onto an enemy.
- Cave of the Descendants, a lot of blind jumps here. Also, this is the second level that has the Catacomb 3D track, and it's getting on my nerves again. More importantly, this level loves its blind jumps. Spikes, mimrocks or even just shovels popping out of the ground, this will throw it at you. It's not too bad, but it comes off as cheap.
- Pyramid of Shadows, the first pyramid I picked, of which there are three. The setup is obvious, you're in a pyramid area, with considerable interior areas. So lots of fun getting around enemies in tight spaces. Too tight, since the way through sometimes seems impossible. Dart guns pop up here, and unlike other trap type enemies, these kill you if you touch them. They show up again in Pyramid of the Ancients, another labyrinthian pyramid.
- Pyramid of the Moons, hey, did you like those dart guns? Now there are twenty of them. Here, they're all shooting at you. Including a donut guarded by four of them. The real star here is an Arachnut guarding the exit, the key's nearby but if you drop down, it's right on top of him. But the key also opens a door in another area, with no way out...except there are a bunch of inchworms. Gather them all together and a foot appears, taking you to the secret level.
- Pyramid of the Forbidden, this level really loves a poison slug and lick combo, there's four of each right off the bat. Then getting a jewel over a spike pit, as you drop down. Then putting a jewel next to a dart gun into a keyhole next to the dart gun. Kudos to those that can beat this level without needing to save, because I suspect that for a lot of people, they weren't going to win with saves. A very long series of mazes along with very dangerous platform trickery over boiling oil and you get the revelation that the Shikadi kidnapped the janitor too.
- Lifewater Oasis, despite the name, not that much of a source of lifewater drops outside of a secret area I couldn't reach. It's actually quite the mundane level full of a bunch of new enemies.
- Miragia, an annoying level. To start with, you have to wait for the level to pop in. Not kidding. Then it's full of all the annoying enemies the game has, in addition to those platforms that appear and disappear, you know the kind. This level is necessary, not because you need to pass it to advance or get one of the guardians, but because it has a scuba suit. See, Keen can't swim, so he needs this.
- Well of Wishes, the level the Dopefish is from. An underwater maze in which you can't shoot anything and have to move giant stupid fish out of the way. How these creatures got so popular is beyond me considering how this level generally isn't fun. Keen moves slow and you have to hammer the jump button to move any faster, you can't look around underwater either.
- Isle of Tar and Isle of Fire, the other two islands. I'd have a lot more to talk about if I didn't play them after the secret level. They're like extended sections of that level. Oh, no, I have to jump over falling platforms over a pit of boiling oil...again. Or fire.
After collecting all the oracles, we get a very joke-filled explanation of what the Skikadi are, where they're from, what they're doing and what they look like. We don't get to see what they look like, unless they all look like Keen. A subtle attempt to get you to buy Keen 5, as the boys at Id probably thought.
While I do like this game, I have to admit, there are aspects of this that aren't very good. On a few days I played this, I had a headache, and the game was no help. While the game is very detailed for an EGA game, it's still an EGA game, and thus garish. The music is 6 minutes in length, total. It doesn't sound that long. The shortest track is used in the most levels, which is sixteen seconds long yet goes on for some of the longer ones.
Weapons:
Your typical basic blaster. 1/10
Enemies:
A nice selection, but seems overly focused on breaking what little advantage the player has. 6/10
Non-Enemies:
Kind of? In addition to the guardians you have to find, there are bouncing balls you can use to reach new heights and a random black lady in a few stages who gives you a hint. 1/10
Levels:
A nice selection, brought down by over reliance on avoiding dangers you can't see and some reuse from Dreams. 8/10
Player Agency:
Easy to understand, difficult to master. I'm still not sure I completely understand how to use the pogo stick. 7/10
Interactivity:
Very simple. 1/10
Atmosphere:
Cartoony, but sometimes leaning on it in a way that annoys me now. 4/10
Graphics:
Quite possibly the nicest looking 16 color game ever made. 7/10
Story:
It's simple, it's effective, and it's nice that we get a reminder of it every time we find one of the guardians. 2/10
Sound/Music:
The sound is okay, but 6 minutes of music for a game that is far far longer than that it an atrocity. 2/10
That's 39, higher than any of the previous entries. What Keen is going for is technically something I'm not necessarily rating high.
Before we once again break continuity for Tomb Raider: Anniversary, we'll see another 1984 game, probably Flyerfox.
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