Dizzy: Prince of the Yolk Folk

Dizzy: Prince of the Yolk Folk was a classic 8 bit game that, in 1991, had kids hooked solving puzzles, jumping from platform to platform and meeting all manner of strange creatures. The question is, from its glory days on the Amiga, does it still stand up as a strong, playable game amongst all the surrounding competition? The answer is... yes!

Dizzy has converted brilliantly to the smartphone world: it's graphically impressive, colourful, with slick gameplay, and as it has stuck with the 90s soundtrack to maintain the retro feel, the music does really stand out here. Fans of the original will love this, the feel is the same although the jumping can be a tad tricky to start with on the touch screen. The format is classic Dizzy in the way you use the items you collect to progress through each part, your main problems will usually come from where to use what item or who to speak to rather than your manoeuvrability around the levels.

A useful feature in Dizzy are the information boards dotted around as pointers, just incase you're having some trouble and wind up a bit stuck, we found this can happen quite easily as some of the items you collect are pretty random and not immediately apparent as to what their use is . You can end up with anything from a red carpet and some dry leaves to a modern style MP3 player.

Encounters with the locals usually come with some good old fashioned British humour and also some quite strange concepts; for example having to return a harp to St Peter up in the clouds at what looks like the gates to heaven, in return for a block of cheese that you have to use to entice a small bear called a “Fluffle” into a box, that you then have to use to scare away a troll! “Hey I said the game was fun, not that it had to make any sense!”..

That's the key word here though - fun. It’s in no way groundbreaking but has everything you would expect from a retro game that has a young target audience. The beauty here is that it's not just a kids game, in the way that Super Mario Bros and Sonic The Hedgehog spanned generations, this has that potential. But where Dizzy falls short of those giants is pace... it is a slower game that rewards you with completed puzzles rather than bright flashing lights and killing bad guys. This is a platformer with an RPG element which is good enough in its own right, but may not necessarily appeal to every platform gamer.

All in all Dizzy is a loveable little egg with charisma, charm and boxing gloves (Although we never get to see him use em!). What's not to like?! The game has a great feel, carries its retro legacy well and will no doubt have the fans of the original more than satisfied. Newcomers may be a little harder to convince but should still be won over in the end by the looks and sounds, those with patience or a tendency more towards RPG games will fall straight into this too. At £1.49 it's great value for money!

Genre spanning, puzzle sovling, friendly fun.. with an egg.