Summary: 20/100

Introduction

This is a classic Adventure-style puzzle game. You pass through a story, solving puzzles along the way to push the plot forward and save the world.

The premise of the game is that Koala Lumpur (a marsupial with a mystical bent) has accidentally read a scroll that opened a portal to another dimension. From that dimension, powerful forces of evil are poised to escape and destroy the world. To head off this disaster, Koala must search through a few weird places to find the scattered pieces of another scroll, which when assembled will close the portal. To help him, he enlists the aid of his old pal, Dr. Dingo Tu-far (an Australian dog), and a fly. You're the fly. You have the power to pick things up and move them around, choose places to go, and lead Koala and Dingo around (when they get somewhere interesting they usually start doing things of their volition).

The style of the graphics is full-color 2D cartoon; the audio is digitized voices and a MIDI soundtrack (along with lots of effects). Along the way our heroes encounter a variety of odd characters who put them through a series of tests and puzzles.

The spirit of the game is intended to be silly, hip, and irreverent.

In reality it's lame and irritating.

There are three big problems with this game: the characters are unattractive, the humorous dialog is weak, and the puzzles are clichés. I'll take these in turn.

Unattractive Characters

The two main characters (Koala and Dingo) are friends, but they're not very cooperative with one another, and most of the banter is traded insults and weak jokes. This doesn't particularly endear them to me. The writers tried to make things a bit risqué by including sexual double entendres, and a running gag about Dingo's testicles. What a scream.

Although they're nice enough drawings when in medium shots, close-ups are terrifying. In long- and medium-shots, the characters are colored with flat colors within black lines - standard cartoon stuff. In close-ups, the flat regions are replaced with appallingly ugly textures. I really disliked looking at them. And continuity is often poor. For example, in some pre-scripted scenes, Koala might be angry in close-up, and then we cut to a medium shot where he's looking calm and relaxed while Dingo responds, and then we return to a close-up of angry Koala. This happened disconcertingly often. I'm not a continuity freak, but this stuff just leaped out at me.

The main characters encounter a variety of bad guys through the game. Of course, these characters are intended to be evil, and they're clearly unsympathetic. So we have the dumb versus the evil. Sometimes I wished evil would win and put these two dimwits out of their misery. Which leads us to the problem of the writing.

Bad Writing

To be blunt, the funny dialog isn't. The level of humor is typified by the name of the lead character: Koala Lumpur. Get it? You're probably wondering why you're missing the joke, because it couldn't possibly be a pun on Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. But it is. This is more of a free-association test than a joke, and it's typical of the writing.
The jokes are predictable and weak. One character encountered along the way is a ventriloquist's dummy, and we are treated to all the predictable old jokes about wooden personalities, who's pulling his strings, and so on. Telling corny jokes in a hip way can be fun; telling bad jokes in a dumb way is just dumb. Granted, the game is labeled "Teen: 13+", but the implication on the box (and the quasi-sexual gags in the game itself) suggest they're aiming at adults. The back of the carton promises "Comedy so outrageous we couldn't print it on the box." That tease is never paid off.

Clichéd and Random Puzzles

Many of the puzzles are clichés, or are of the most aggravating random sort.

At one point you have to navigate through a tunnel maze. Oh, please, another maze. And each step through the maze takes ten seconds or so, and you have to hold your hand on the mouse to make quick reflex decisions when you come to branch points. In other words, they've done everything they could to force you to be anal-retentive for an hour or so and map out the maze in excruciating detail so that you can be sure you've been everywhere and found all the essential little things they've left lying around. The maze tunnels all look identical; in fact, I think there are only about three or four frames of animation that they cycle to represent all your flights down the tunnel. So you get to see those frames over and over until you are thoroughly sick of them, and at that point you're only partway through the seemingly interminable mapping process.

The random games are even worse. For example, there is a puzzle where Dingo needs to communicate in dog-language with another dog. As the fly, you choose his words from a list at the side of the screen from a menu including "woof", "bow-wow", and so on. You have to find the right four or five words to say to the other dog, or he punches you back outside the room, where you have to get up, open the door, enter the room, walk up to the guard (all of which takes time), and try again. There is no rhyme or reason to the language; you just have to try endless combinations until you get it right. This is typical of the sort of pointless puzzle that designers fall back on to pad out gameplay so that they can claim "hours and hours of fun!" I finally gave up and found a cheatsheet on the net, and followed the instructions to utter the correct phrases and get past the dog. To add insult to injury, you have to do this not once, but twice. The problem here is that you are essentially forced to exhaustively search (at considerable time expense) for the correct solutions, which are essentially random.

As an analogy, imagine that I told you that I'm thinking of a 5-digit number, and you had to guess it. You'd tell me your guess (one digit at a time, so it takes a few seconds), and if you're wrong I just say "wrong" and make you go through a little 10-second dance before you could try again. Now imagine that I haven't even told you it's five digits - I'm just thinking of a number. Try to guess it. Good grief, talk about bad design.

The maze and the dog-language "puzzle" are typical of the puzzles in this game. Some are fair and interesting, but most are hackneyed or pointless (yet time-consuming).

Summary

This game is the weak little brother of "Sam and Max Hit The Road," published by LucasArts. In that game, you have two genuine characters, who utter witty dialog and get into interesting situations. That game has its own problems, but it dwarfs this game in style and spirit. Sam and Max is funny and fun. Koala Lumpur is neither.

The game looks like a couple of different art styles hooked together by a mediocre script and bad puzzles. Even with a cheatsheet by your side to help you through the tough spots, there's little reward in playing this uninspired game. Not recommended.