Bogee Expedition – Review

Our rating:

By: Sergo Kalandadze

Version #: 1.0

Date Released: 2010-04-15

Developer: Bogee Interactive

Price: 1.99

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I have many fond memories of playing on my friends Commodore and DOS computers, and all the great platformer games they had like Commander Keen and Crystal Caves. These games have so much charm with their 8-bit music and pixel graphics. I still enjoy playing them through emulators. Bogee Expedition, a game that is steeped in classic platforming style, is a new app from Bogee Games. Bogee Games is a relative new comer to the iPhone game scene but not to games in general. Bogee has been making java games for lesser mobile phones for years, and even Bogee Expedition itself began its life as a J2ME title.

The game follows the classic platform game recipe with side scrolling and item collection. You play as Bogee, the youngest looking college student I have ever seen, who has been sent by his professor on an archeological expedition in order to earn his degree. Your mission it each level is to gather all of the indicated items, which is different for each level, in the allotted time, and without losing all your health. Obstacles tend to be of two types, animals that will hurt you if you touch them, and people that will throw projectiles at you, and also hurt you if they touch you. Animals are the easiest to deal with since you can collect items to offer them, after which they will be harmless for the remainder of the level. As you progress the environment and enemies change, but their characteristics remain largely the same.

Controls on Bogee Expedition are set along the bottom, and are in a horizontal row instead of the virtual d-pad style seen on so many other games. There are settings to change the order of the keys but it would be nice to see a more conventional control method. The main problem with the controls is not with the layout, but with the responsiveness. This is where Bogee Expedition reminds me the most of its DOS ancestors. Try to make quick movements and you will find the buttons will become unresponsive causing you to miss that jump or to get hit by an enemy. The game also seems to move very slowly and can be frustrating for those use to the smoother game play found on other games on the iPhone. You can see this games J2ME roots throughout and it is a shame that Bogee didn’t take advantage of the more powerful platform.

It is obvious that Bogee wanted to bring their previous work to the iPhone platform with the same look and feel as the original, and to that end they have succeeded. Bogee Expedition is a fun game with a great look in spite of the areas where it lacks. It would have been nice to see Bogee follow in the foot steps of other developers that have brought classic games to the iPhone. They retain the look and feel of the original, but at the same time to take advantage of the iPhones capabilities.

With so many high quality games at the two dollar range, I find it hard to recommend Bogee Expedition without at least some improvements from the original.