In my quest to review the games on my The Spectrum in fairly random order, I have gotten to El Stompo. El Stompo was released in 2014 and as such is a another "modern" game for the ZX Spectrum, just like my previous review game TCQ. In El Stompo you play as a frog-like creature who works as a TV repair...frog. The only way it knows to repair things is by stomping on them. Of course!
What follows is 35 screens of puzzle solving, in which you need to avoid enemies, obstacles and traverse tricky levels to get to stomping all those TV's.
El Stompo is a pretty game. It's colorful, has some really cute sprites and as soon as you figure out what the different blocks and items do, everything is easy to understand and play. The puzzle solving really ranges from fairly simple to fiendish but El Stompo nails the "just one more try"-feedback loop and I never felt frustrated when things didn't go my way. Some variables can feel like they are on the edge of too random and some times you are required to do some good old waiting just for circumstances to be fruitful, but never to the point where it would detract from the fun. My only gripe with the game is that the jump button (A) and restart level button (B) are right next to each other on the controller and I miss clicked this way more than I would've liked.
The controls take a little bit of getting used to, it's easy to overshoot a step which often means death, especially on later levels. But once you know, you know.
El Stompo doesn't have any music, which I actually didn't mind as much as I thought I would. I realized while playing that not having any background music could actually be quite nice. I guess as a creator you'd reason that silence is better than something that would annoy, though I have no idea if this is the reason game creator Dave Hughes omitted a soundtrack. The game does have a few sound effects though, and they are suitably scrappy and bloppy.
El Stompo is really fun and a great addition to the Spectrum game library. If you have the opportunity to try it out I recommend it. I've only gotten to level 20 so far, but I am definitely not giving up.
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