Previous Next

Although Batman sold more, Head Over Heels is widely recognised as the best isometric adventure written, and still extremely tough competition for Bitmap Bros forthcoming Cadaver. The eponymous heroes are spies from the planet Freedom. Head is the veteran, while Heel is the rookie ex-Olympic Upside-Down Tightrope Walker! Head can make big leaps, and stun foes by throwing doughnuts at them, while Heel is the faster runner and also the only one who can carry objects. If they meet, they can be combined to make a single character. Their mission is to liberate the enslaved planets of the Blacktooth Empire by rescuing five stolen crowns.

Unfortunately the spies have been captured and imprisoned in separate cells. But security is slacker than Strangeways, with a teleporter left working in each cell. So they're soon running around, chased by police bollards and daleks disguised as elephants, chimpanzees, fruit machines, and even Prince Charles! Help comes in the form of stuffed bunnies which give extra lives, invulnerability, improved jump, and speed. Even weirder are Reincarnation Fish: when touched they take on your personality - so if you die a clone is created, a sort of save position feature. Then there's Hush Puppies which form bridges and platforms, but they've met Head before and disappear whenever he appears.

Head Over Heels includes five different worlds: Egyptus, Safari, Book World, Penitentiary and Blacktooth, making up over 300 puzzle-packed rooms. If liberating all the planets seems too tough, you can also wimp out and simply try to escape.

The game earned 98% and a Gold Medal in August '87, with uniformly ecstatic comments. Julian Rignall: "The graphics are outstanding... superb characters... incredibly rewarding". Steve Jarratt: "Very, very addictive... the feeling of actually existing in three-dimensions within the game is overwhelming". Ciaran Brennan: "one of the finest games I've ever seen... the fact that there is more than one way to solve most puzzles adds greatly to the playability." The ratings were 98% for everything, except sound (79%) and hookability (96%).

Three years later, one wonders if the brilliance of this game isn't responsible for the dearth of similar games since - who could dream of matching it. The graphics are incredibly detailed and, while monochrome, move quite quickly. The imagination shown throughout is overwhelming, both in graphics and the superb puzzles which will keep you hooked for months. C64 fanatics might be wary of such a "Speccy-looking" game, but it really is unbelievably playable. The only disappointment is that no Amiga version is planned, as one desperate reader was hoping for!