Boulderdash 40th Anniversary Review (Switch)

Hands up anyone who feels old at the fact that we have reached the 40^th anniversary of Boulderdash. The classic rock dropping and gem finder has gone on to influence a ton of games and dates back all the way to the 8-bit era. While we were always Repton fans ourselves, it’s undeniable how iconic the game is and now it’s been brought to new systems in a comprehensive package.

For the uninitiated the game revolved around the player navigating a maze of dirt, rocks, gems and moving enemies from a flat 2D perspective. You can move freely through the dirt, but any rocks perched on top will then fall. If they hit you, you get crushed and die. Rocks will also fall off other rocks, sometimes creating huge landslides which can easily trap you in and cause a level restart. Once enough gems in a level have been collected an exit will open allowing progress to the next stage.

We certainly can’t complain about the number of levels included. As well as the first three games, there are a ton of new levels created with more up to date graphics. We do think the new look has a very ‘mobile game’ quality, but this isn’t the most deep of experiences so it’s not the end of the world. While most collections now seem to include emulated versions of original games that isn’t strictly the case here. You can play the games with either a C64 or Atari filter, but these aren’t the original versions of the game. You would be hard pressed to tell though.

Controls wise everything works well. Before a recent update you had to use the left stick to control movement, which was incredibly twitchy, but you can now use the cursor keys which is transformative in terms of precision movement. This has made the games a lot more friendly to play and means you are rarely overshooting when moving around. With a game this tough it really didn’t need anything else getting in the way of progression.

Boulderdash 40^th anniversary does fall between two audiences though. If you haven’t experienced the game before there probably isn’t much here that’s going to really draw you in. While fans may feel a little shortchanged by the fact there isn’t much in the way of archive footage or that more versions of the games haven’t been included. When you think to the extensive retro collections now filling the Switch this does begin to look a bit bare bones in terms of content by comparison. That said, there’s a lot of Boulderdash here, so if you are a fan or into these types of games there’s certainly enough to get into.

Overall 7/10