Kolibri is certainly colourful, fast, and with plenty of sprites flying around the screen. Flying being a key word – as a hummingbird, everything takes place in the air, with very occasional ground-based enemies. Frustratingly the development team have obviously seen nature videos where the hummingbirds move around slightly in the air, because they’ve implemented that here – my bird was shifting around a little when I really wanted it to just stay still and let a projective pass.
It is a bit of a frustrating game in places. In order for the game to look as natural as possible, they have dispensed with an on-screen display. You can’t see how much health you have left unless you get hit or collect an energy ball, at which point one, two, three or four little hummingbirds appear around you to show you how many hits you can absorb. You also can’t easily see what weapon you are holding, though of course that can be fixed by firing it. I think that your bird colour changes depending on the weapon as well, but I’m not entirely sure.
I’ve played through the first five or six levels now, and there’s a bit of variety there. In Aero the Acro-Bat, you were given some instructions when you started each level on what the goal was – jump on certain platforms, or defeat a certain number of specific enemies – but here you just need to work out what’s going on before you die. Not always possible, but at least there appear to be infinite lives; you just start again at the beginning of the level you died on.
[A side note: screenshots taken on this emulator often come out a bit odd, I think because of the way the Mega Drive and 32X outputs are being combined. The third screenshot here, for example, only has the background on the upper half the screen, whereas actually there was a hill there.]
The other issue is that the powerups are a bit too similar to each other and easy to pick up. Normally ease of collection would be a good thing, but here there are about six or seven weapons and you can collect the powerup for the one you want. I am particularly fond of the homing energy balls, or the lasers, but often find that I’m accidentally collecting other weapons instead. Homing weapons are useful because enemies can come from both sides, and the controls are a bit picky in terms of turning around.
It’s a breath of fresh air for horizontal shooters – look, no spaceships! – but it’s a little frustrating to control, which ruins it somewhat.
Tim's Gaming Diary 