Nicky Boom

STORY / GAMEPLAY
In this colorful action platform game Nicky's grandfather is captured by a cruel witch named Zoldraneand and kept locked inside a dark dungeon. Nicky hopes to find the old man and learn all the secrets of the forest tribe he is the guardian of. To stop Nicky finding his grandfather, the witch has changed the peaceful inhabitants of the woods into monsters and ordered them to watch around her castle. But Nicky does not give up and sets off his adventure to the evil witch castle. You are called to help Nicky get around the traps and fight alla the enemies that swarm the land! Nicky Boom is a pleasantly executed and very playable bounce around game with a few neat puzzles chucked in. Nicky has to make his way through 8 levels of rib-tickling bugs, spiders, killer snails, birds and an assortment of other nasties. The young boy is armed with an array of weapons and power ups like bombs while he also discover the keys needed to proceed. As long as you hold down the fire button, Nicky will throw a more powerful bomb destroying everything around or even open certain doors as soon as he possesses the key. Collecting various items (most of them left from dead nasties) such as sweets, cakes and bonbons will grant Nicky with extra health and more powerful bombs. Thankfully, the difficulty level increases gradually so you'll have the time to learn the game's mechanics with ease.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
Nicky Boom runs in VGA mode but it has only 16 colors on-screen (that's half the colors the ST version has!) Also, the Amiga's nice color gradients we see on the skies are missing from the DOS! The sprites animation is quite smooth and the backgrounds are detailed but, much like the Atari ST version, Nicky Boom plays in flip-screen mode, which makes it rather difficult especially when you have to jump on smaller platforms located on an edge of a screen. Regarding the animation, the whole action is way faster on the DOS compared to its Amiga and ST counterparts, which is mostly bad as everything moves awkward! As for the sound, the in-game sound effects are very few and below average while there is a nice in-game tune (a totally different tune from the Amiga version) that adds to the overall gameplay.

GAMEPLAY SAMPLE VIDEO
On our video below you may watch the Atari ST, Amiga OCS/ECS and DOS versions of the game.