That Swagman sure has a lot of nerve! He's another evil, demented fellow who's planning to take over the world for his own personal gain. And this guy means business. You see, he's basically a boogie-man who has the power to entrap people in their own nightmares forever. Fortunately, there are two brave souls out there ready to fight Swagman face to face. Their names are Zac and Hannah, two 8 year old twins. Swagman is a combination of the platform and adventure genre. While in the "Real World", the game is adventure-like; find and collect items and/or keys to open certain doors. When you enter the dream sequences, called the Territories, the game becomes a platform game. The combination of genres and the whole real world/dream world is a neat idea and throw in some nice, cartoonish and highly colorful graphics and you've got a nifty little game.
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Swagman is a game that would be passable if it came out on SNES. Even so, this would not save it from being unremarkable, as your time would be better spent on similar games like Zombies Ate My Neighbors or Ghoul Patrol. Coming out in 1997 when the market had things like Crash Bandicoot 2, Final Fantasy VII, and Symphony of the Night, Swagman pales in comparison. It’s a 2D overhead puzzle platformer where you control 2 children trying to save their town from Swagman, the video game equivalent of Freddy Krueger. Overall, it’s inoffensive, primarily just boring and monotonous.
The primary reason I abandoned Swagman is because one of my biggest pet peeves in all video games is ever-present in this title: when it comes to deaths and game overs, this game does not respect your time.
When you die in Swagman, the screen slowly fades to black, then fades to a game over screen with Swagman’s face. You have 10 seconds to press the start button to continue. Should you not continue, you get sent to the main menu where you have to reload your last save. If you decide to continue, the game has to reload the area you were in which takes a few seconds. From there, it respawns you at the beginning of the room before the room you died in. When you’re at the start of the game, it’s not so bad because the rooms are pretty small. Once you get further into the game, it becomes so irritating. The rooms are much bigger and last longer. Puzzles you’ve already completed must be solved again. Any complicated platforming segments must be completed again. Any important items or consumables you’re running low on must be collected again. To get to each boss, you have to build a bridge by watching a cutscene that takes a while. Every time you die to a boss, you must watch this cutscene again. Maybe this doesn’t sound too terrible, but to top it all off, the game respawns you with the amount of health you had when you entered the previous room. If you entered a room with 1 health and cant find any HP pickups, you just have to hope you won’t die again. In a game that’s littered with rooms full of unkillable enemies and insta-death pits, you are doomed to see the game over screen again and again and again. You can chalk it up to skill issues, but I promise a boring game like this with a terrible checkpoint system is not worth the time or effort.