Developed and published by Team 17 in 1993.

By 1993 the Amiga was on a downward spiral. Doom would be released on PC that year and cemented it's technical superiority over the Amiga in terms of what a home computer could achieve.

It's interesting to note that Qwak first appeared as a game on the BBC Micro home computer. Team 17 took the concept and developed a new version for the Amiga with much better graphics and audio.

In some ways, Qwak is typical of the games that continued to be developed for the Amiga. It's by no means a bad game, but I felt that Amiga games started to look fairly amateur in comparison to the PC by this point.

Qwak is not a bad game by any means. It's a combination of Bubble Bobble, combined with some strategy and puzzle elements where the objective is to collect all the golden keys on each level before heading to the exit.

Various cutesy enemies try and block your progress, each one adhering to a specific movement path. Some will follow the player around, whilst others jump in predefined patterns, but all of them do damage to the player if touched.

Rather than instantly losing a life, Qwak wears an armoured vest that degrades with each hit he takes (think Leander crossed with Ghosts n' Goblins). Once the armour is gone then the next damage that Qwak takes will turn him into a steaming roast duck.

Qwak can defend himself by throwing eggs at enemies. However, you only have a limited supply and the enemies grow tougher throughout the game, requiring so many hits that it's better to try and avoid them altogether. Extra eggs can be gained by collecting fruit or the +10 egg collectibles that can appear on certain levels.

In addition to the enemies, there are various blocks and collectibles that have negative effects. Spike blocks cause 1 hit of damage, whilst skull blocks kill on contact. Part of the strategy is to work out the best route through the level to the keys.

Every 10th level requires the player to beat several "guardians", which are just big versions of the regular critters. These must be killed in a strict time limit else spikes start falling from the top of the screen.

Once beaten, you progress through another 10 levels. The game has a total of 80 levels, although these are not unique. Many of the levels get recycled and simply have a different backdrop, or have additional traps added.

The game becomes crushingly difficult by the 7th world when it decides to "turn out the lights". All enemies and moving objects become invisible making it impossible to progress without collecting one of the light-bulbs that appear on the level. These only last a short amount of time before the lights go out again, meaning you have to rush to complete the level, usually resulting in a very quick death. By this stage, I also found myself to be completely out of eggs, making it an even tough experience.

I managed to beat level 71, at which point I encountered an unrecoverable bug that I think was associated with a massive gem bonus score. No matter what I tried, the game crashed to a Guru Meditation error every time it tried to calculate the end-of-level bonus.

Even if I hadn't encountered the crash, the game has no ending and simply loops around back to level 1 (although it calls it 81 and keeps counting).

Qwak actually lives on today, with a version for Apple iOS devices available with some very nice graphics that stay true to the Amiga version. If you fancy a fun puzzle game, it might be worth looking up.

Enjoy!
#retrogaming