Pushover

Puzzle 1992 Dos Dosbox Ocean Cartoon Adventure Strategy

Entertaining and head-scratching

This little known puzzle game from the Ocean stable is a bit of a departure from their usual licensed games like Robocop or arcade conversions like Operation Wolf and New Zealand Story and while it isn't perfect it is intriguing enough to warrant a look. Rather bizarrely, it is actually based on a brand of crisps popular in England and revolves around the antics of the brand mascot and who has lost his favourite snack. The player takes control of the ant who is charged with recovering them and which requires you to complete a set of 100 puzzles that play out like immensely complicated domino challenges. Each level tasks you with placing different kinds of domino that have varying effects, in such a fashion that when pushed they will all fall down, which will then open the exit to the next level. Numerous aspects add to the difficulty, for example with the exit being required to be accessible after all the dominoes have fallen and with the ant capable of being crushed by a falling domino, so careful consideration of their placement is vital. A time limit also increases the tension but if you get stuck, a hint system is available which does come in handy sometimes. Pushover is definitely an interesting attempt at a puzzle game and it should appeal to fans of Lemmings or Sid & Al's Incredible Toons. The puzzles are generally quite taxing and clever, despite the game's cartoon-like nature, and provide plenty of enjoyable head-scratching moments, although the difficult level is rather uneven. Graphics are simple but appealing with a nice sense of light humour and overall this is an entertaining little puzzler.

A puzzler with platformer elements

At its heart this game is a simple and yet interesting set of individual screens within a larger child like animation framework. You play as a dog, who's looking to advance through each level and to do that he has to move, push, re-arranged a lot of different obstacles found throughout the level. The game is not too diverse, so within half an hour you will have exhausted the entire challenge types that you are offered. To be frank, this game would have been much better off being a simpler puzzler game, scraping away with the platformer portions. The puzzles themselves don't really lend themselves to being solved via a left and right moving character. They would have worked much better in a more abstract way, but, I guess, I'm not in the target audience. My guess is this game will be adored by small children who love animations with cute animals and who will get much more of a kick out of the simple puzzle games. The graphics work great and the music is also very cartoonish, adding extra flavor to the game. Thus, a great game for children but not so much for older players.

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