Kolibri (32X) Review
Date Released: November 1995
Date Played: 4 March 2022
Despite playing this game when it originally came out and once again about 12 years ago, in my mind Kolibri was a free-roaming horizontal shmup in the same vein as Fantasy Zone or Defender. While it does have some of those elements, it actually has more in common with the Ecco the Dolphin series and focuses on exploration, cryptic puzzles, and tricky maneuvering rather than high intensity shoot 'em action. This makes more sense because the game was developed by Novotrade, the same team that made the Ecco games. Being one of the few exclusive games for the Sega 32X, this game has developed a bit of a reputation in the collecting community for being very unique, beautiful, and hard to find. It commands a rather high price if you want a physical copy (especially if you want it complete in box). Despite it being highly sought after in the collector's community, I've never heard anyone who has much positive to say about the gameplay, and since it's release, it has elicited a mediocre response from both the critics and the public.
You play as a hummingbird who is happy living his hummingbird life. The first level involves freely flying around the horizontally scrolling area trying to figure out what to do (just like the first stage of Ecco the Dolphin). There are no real threats or any dangers other than the single toad hanging out at the bottom of the screen who will gobble you up if you get too close. Other than a fire, dash, and the occasional special ability, there really isn't anything too complicated about the controls and you'll mostly be holding the fire button as you explore. After several minutes of confusion, you'll eventually figure out that you need to kill the bugs hovering around several groups of flowers spread out throughout the level and then drink from them. This will lead your hummingbird buddies to them to get their own dring, and once they are all found, some great catastrophe occurs and the world is in danger (once again, just like Ecco). From this point you will work your way through the game encountering a variety of levels with different gameplay elements. Some levels will be auto-scrollers that can zig and zag all around, others you have to explore and kill all enemies, many are puzzle based where you have to find items required to unlock paths and advance, and some are just simple side-scrollers. The one common element that carries through all of them is the way you control the hummingbird. Enemies are fast and fly in from above, blow, behind, and will assault you constantly. The hummingbird controls kind of awkwardly and seems to have strange inertia at some points and at others will stop on a dime. This makes dodging the enemies and their projectiles more difficult than it needs to be. I never really got the hang of it and rarely felt like I had complete control. While there are several different weapons you have access to by collecting the various orbs floating around the levels, many of them are based around a homing shot. This is essential, because turning around with the hummingbird is poorly implemented. If you're holding down the shoot button (which you will usually be doing), the bird won't turn around if you press the opposite direction of the way you're currently facing. Instead, he will just strafe backwards, often crashing into the enemies behind you that you were trying to turn and shoot. If you want to turn, you have to stop firing, THEN press in the opposite direction. This takes a few frames of animation and feels very clunky and slow. Since you're being assaulted constantly from all sides and a breakneck speed, you constantly need to stop firing (which will lead to an enemy hitting you) to turn around repeatedly, or just kind of hang out in the center of the screen and attempt to dodge while your homing shots take out the bad guys. The other shots that only fire straight ahead are a death trap because you can't turn to fire quick enough unless you already know from where the enemies are going to be coming. Most of these enemies are bugs like bees, flies, beetles, centipedes, and wasps. But you'll also encounter frogs, lizards, other birds, and even some aquatic type creatures. You'll be able to grab orbs that grant you an extra hit and bank up to 5 of them at a time, but most of the time, you're in 1 hit death territory. The brief length of the stages, the fast enemies, and fast deaths make the game feel inexorable. When you die you start back at the beginning of the stage with infinite lives, but it usually won't be long until you die again and have to start over. The very repetitive gameplay loop truly sinks in as you do the same tasks over and over. It won't be long until you've had your fill and will be ready to take a break. Luckily, the game has a password system that lets you pick back up at the beginning of the stage. So, if you have enough patience, you'll eventually make it to the end. Sadly, the game just isn't that much fun, and very few will like it enough to make it that far.
The game is very beautiful in terms of it's visuals and features a vibrant and colorful nature setting that is quite charming and is the biggest draw of Kolibri. You'll travel through forested areas, underground caverns, waterfalls, and more as you work your way through the game's 20 gorgeous stages. Most of these are very appealing but do tend to blur into each of them not only because of their similar settings, brief lengths, but also the obtuse gameplay elements that are featured that force your to replay them over and over. Before long, the game feels like a series of frustrating challenges that are loosely strung together that just piles on the frustration to either lull you to sleep with boredom or to make you want to rage quit. To add to this, the bizarre soundtrack does nothing to elevate the experience. Instead of being light and whimsical like you would expect in a colorful game about a hummingbird, you're greeted by a dark an ominous song on the title screen. I guess this is meant to foreshadow the environmental disaster theme that the developers were so adamant about shoving in your face in both this game and the Ecco games. It's a worthwhile soap box to stand on, but I feel like it's pretty heavy handed in these games and isn't really presented well in either case. It's pretty much, "Earth Good!, Pollution Bad!" without much more nuance on display. The rest of the soundtrack is mostly ambient nature sounds with some light background music. It's fine most of the time, but is nothing if not boring. When things do ramp up, the music doesn't get much better and is mostly forgettable.
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