Tiny Barbarian DX review
Howard's way.
I've never read a Conan the Barbarian novel, but I suspect that they're weirdly comforting. Heads will be knocked from shoulders and rib-cages will be crushed as the red mist descends, but you're travelling in the company of someone who can handle themselves pretty well, and the fantasy's warmly familiar in a pulpy sort of way, what with all its serpent worshippers and full moons and tumble-down temples.
Tiny Barbarian DX channels the popular idea of Robert E. Howard's fiction with surprising power - and it too is weirdly comforting. This is an old-school hack-and-slash platformer-brawler unburdened by tricks and gimmicks and RPG progression systems. Playing it takes me back to 1990 so forcefully that I need to keep reminding myself I don't have double maths and a long-distance run tomorrow morning.
![](https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/139032256626.jpg?width=690&quality=75&format=jpg&auto=webp)
It's unadorned, then, but the game's so wonderfully unselfconscious in its aims that it creates the perfect atmosphere in which to enjoy its simple charms. Run, jump, smack a variety of snake things around and make your way through a handful of deadly levels landing on as few spikes as possible. You'll be done in two hours (The Serpent Lord is the first episode in a series of four short instalments, all of which are covered by the price), and replay's only really an option if you're hunting for the hidden diamond collectables or aiming for a speed run - but what's here is enough, just about. This is both a decent platformer-brawler in its own right and a portal back to a more straightforward era - an era when platformer-brawlers were the fanciest things a game could hope to be, so why add anything more?
That's not to say there isn't variety. Beyond the basic handful of combos lies a game that's eager to mix things up in a series of thrifty ways, whether it's the pre-credits horde mode that sees you dumped into the adventure proper tied to a tree and being attacked by buzzards, or sections where you have to scramble upwards to escape an endlessly scrolling screen or race across a golden temple on the back of a war cat. Bosses are simple but satisfying and each change of tilesets - sandstone ruins, gloomy sewers, bizarre palaces - sees a handful of new monsters introduced, including hands that reach up from fetid pools and scarlet snakes that spring from downed conjurers once you've played a few rounds of Zelda tennis against them. The animation's astonishingly good: your barbarian's just bursting with circus strongman energy as he races around cleaving and sundering.
![](https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/139032257649.jpg?width=690&quality=75&format=jpg&auto=webp)
Does it stick in the mind? About as firmly as a Conan the Barbarian novel, I suspect: you'll play it, enjoy it, and then forget about it all pretty swiftly. A few years later you'll spy it from the corner of your eye and you'll get to rediscover the whole thing once more. That was always the way with a good pulp, right? And, now that nobody really reads pulp fiction any more, it's the way with a good platformer-brawler, too.