User Reviews

Brain-teasers are easy enough to come by. From the cross-word puzzles of varying difficulty found if you look for them to the riddles that many people(so many that they've assembled books of riddles) scramble their brain trying to solve... and yet I would have to say that Lemmings is probably the first - and fifteen years later, still about the only - of its kind. The game gives you a group of lemmings and a bunch of tools for them to use... and as the group of the animals of(at least in the game) questionable smarts walk forward until they're stopped, you have to make sure that what stops them is the exit... and not dropping to their death, walking off the screen or going head-first into one of the many traps found in the levels. The idea is strange, but it works, and quite well, at that. The screen shows the lemmings and the level from the side, and you can scroll horizontally to view the whole thing. To use a tool, you simply click on its icon(which also display the maximum possible uses of the tool) at the bottom of the screen, and then on the lemming you want to use it. That's it. Through the first bunch of levels, you'll learn what the various tools do and what they're good for, and the rest of the game has you utilizing them in order to successfully complete the many puzzles that lie ahead. In total, there are about one hundred... so you'd better get crackin'. This is good for countless hours of fun and/or head-scratching. The design is great, almost every level has detailed backgrounds and nicely drawn scenery. The traps and lemmings are well-animated... heck, even the untimely demise(in all its various forms) of these poor creatures is done in great detail(and due to the cartoon-y style, it's been completely rid of blood or gore... they explode in what can best be described as fireworks, for example). The tools all have very specific effects on the surroundings, and you must master them all if you are to have any hope of solving the entire game. I must admit I have a preference for the stair-builder... it's such a useful one for a multitude of reasons, and I've always liked the animation for it. Not every single puzzle is a new one; some return later, requiring new(more difficult) solutions to pass. In addition to mastering the tools, you'll also need a good overview, great timing and a solid head on your shoulders. There are differing thresholds of mistakes... you're not always allowed the same amount of slip-ups with the ability to complete the current puzzle on that same try(but you can of course start it over at any time you want), and all of them are timed... some give you more than enough time, others just exactly the amount that you need. Apart from the tools, the game also has a few other helpful functions... you can pause the game at any time, freezing the action and the timer, and simply take some time to think, and/or look over the current challenge, you can fast-forward(which is good when you know that what you've set in motion will finish the level, and you don't want to have to wait while all the suicidal creatures walk into the exit. The original version of the game had each completed challenge grant you the password for the next... so that you could return to exactly where in the long line of them you were, on any computer you played it on. In 1995, Psygnosis released a Windows version(also featuring Oh No! More Lemmings, which adds more than a hundred more puzzles, doubling the playing time), which seems to run fine on any Windows(up to and including XP, at least, which is what I have), and here, the passwords are discarded in favor of a user-based system, ensuring that the player does no longer need to keep a pad of paper and a pen nearby when playing in order to play on from where he got to. This version also features a selector, making you able to choose which challenge to try next, and, thankfully, a "cheat" option, allowing you to skip any that you simply can not figure out or work your way through... though it does mark it with a question mark rather than a "completed" mark, on the list, to remind you that you did not actually complete that one. The game features muzak... each challenge plays track after track of midi versions of well-known(and presumably public domain) songs, and you catch yourself humming the darn things after a playing for a while. A quirky feature, but it fits in with the rest of the game. One of the great things is that this can be played by just about anyone, regardless of age or nationality; if you can read numbers and do basic math you can play this. Understanding a little bit of English is a plus, but it's not really necessary. This is a quite simple game, and it works great as that... but at times, I must admit, I missed some more features. A function that could be switched on/off which automatically ended the challenge if you lost too many of the poor animals, instead of letting you save too few would have been nice, and zoom would often have helped, as they sometimes bunch up, and it is then difficult to give the right one the tool, or similar. Perhaps not the original game, but maybe the Windows version, since it did add other things, including several different screen resolutions... ah, then again, I suppose you shouldn't tamper with a classic. This is one of the best puzzle games ever made, and will always be remembered, seldom properly copied and never truly outdone. There are several sequels, which is something to brag about for this type of game. I recommend this to any fan of brain-teasers. 9/10

PROS

• In the world of anthropomorphic lemmings walking on twos and relying on an anthropic being sitting in front of the monitor, lemmings are eager to leave their homes and go on bumpy adventures to find a better place, but they can only do so with the help of the player, who must instruct the critters to work together to reach their destined haven. The player loads a level from one of the large sets in the order of difficulty, ranging - as the difficulty names suggest - from "Fun" and "Tame" to "Mayhem" and "Havoc", and each level defines the limited number of given uses for each of the eight abilities and the requirements of what ratio of the lemmings launching into the level need to be rescued under a specific time. The eight abilities are for training a lemming to climb 90-degree-or-more walls that otherwise would leave it forced to go another direction, training one to fall great heights without hurting itself, bombing one after a 5-second delay to rid blockers or as a special means of digging, getting one to stand and block and redirect the critters away, temporarily building near-diagonal steps to reach somewhere otherwise inaccessable, destroying walls horizontally, digging near-diagonally, and digging vertically. The challenge comes from the fact that the higher the requirements for beating a level and the fewer the given uses of abilities depending on which type of abilities, the harder the level. When a level is started, you are able to control the release rate of the lemmings at the start and use one of the available abilities to make a lemming perform an action, but you must carefully do so as you run out of uses doing so and you want to prevent your lemmings from falling into booby traps, into a pool of water or other fluid since they cannot swim, or off-screen. The levels seem to make every use of all the abilities very carefully, and some of those in the later difficulty sets are the same levels from earlier that are harder to complete using different abilities. As this is a puzzle game, the player constistently tries to figure out which given abilities to use and how to use them, and the best part is finding the right solution. The much earlier levels are a lot like training levels, and the later levels require serious thinking in solving them in ways how the player might never have expected to complete them. It seems in both the original and the needed expansion pack that DMA Design has found as many such ways as possible to complete a level, and playing it again after a while is still quite a challenge.
• As a frosting to the cake, Lemmings offers a decent soundtrack composed of its own original music and music based on classic sheets and nursery songs such as Can Can, London Bridge, and Dance of the Reed Flutes, all given a twist to capture the spirit of the game's pace. The animations are practically animate, and the graphics, while carefully designed, feel slightly minimal for a 1991 game, but some versions of the game allow playing it with high-resolution textures enabled, which resolves the issue of the minimality.
• This here will describe features some of which are present in some versions of Lemmings and others in others. If you have played Lemmings on anything other than the Amiga (the original), you are almost certain to have missed the absent multiplayer. It is a game mode involving two persons competing on a single computer to see which player can rescue the most Lemmings. In each of the symmetrical maps, players control their own team of lemmings and command them to work their way to the exit. What makes the challenge more competitive and strategic in nature is that their players' actions affect not only their own lemmings and the environment, but also each other's; they are able to hinder the progress of the other player or lure the opposing critters into their own exits for more points. It is a shame that the later and more-able computers did not have at least the ability to play multiplayer online. Besides multiplayer, also exclusive to some releases is the replay button, which can be used to rewind to any previous point in the level the player is struggling, and another thing is fast-forwarding, which speeds up the gameplay and is useful for eliminating wait times, especially after having done everything to successfully complete the level.

NEUTRAL

• The original game was a pleasant experience, but it could be completed a few days into the game if the player is highly familiar with the rules of Lemmings. Fortunately, there is one expansion pack for most, if not all, editions of the game that fixes that and with new level graphics gives us more Lemmings. Some editions have another expansion pack, which is a set of Christmas-themed levels and extends the game even further.

CONS

• I am rating the best (theoretical) version of the game, and the good news? There is nothing wrong with the game! On the note of that, there are versions of the game that will definitely be much better than the others; for example, the original Amiga version exclusively had multiplayer, but the one for Windows 95 had high-resolution graphics and a rewindable replay in case the player makes a mistake far into the level. I doubt that such an edition exists, but if it does, then that is what I am rating.

CONCLUSION: Thanks to its playful background melody, cute characters, colorful interactive environment and props, and a rich set of varying puzzles, Lemmings is the game of anyone's child- and adulthood that is as playable as it is challenging.