With a modern HD reboot almost upon us, System 3 have released the original Amiga ROM of Putty Squad for free. The main selling point of this story is that Putty Squad was never actually released for Commodore's 16-bit home computer as the publishers felt that, in 1994, the Amiga was no longer a competitor in the video games market. This was due to the 16-bit consoles from Nintendo and Sega being the main players at this stage, with the Playstation and Saturn just around the corner. The finished game didn't go entirely to waste, however, with a port released for the Super Nintendo released by Ocean. Now, 20 years later, System 3 have unleashed the final version of the unreleased Amiga version onto the internet, for retro gamers to enjoy via their emulator of choice, or even on the original hardware - if you are lucky enough to still have one.
Putty Squad retains the zany visuals and pliable protagonist from the first game, with a host of new abilities and gadgets to assist him along the way. The object is to absorb your fellow putties in distress, before making a dash for the exit door. Along with the standard jumping, Putty can stretch himself to reach other platforms and can use a large fist to smite any of the bizarre adversaries that stand in his way - usually an assortment of insane cats in various costumes. It's completely bonkers, with a colourful cartoon style and silly sound effects. Unfortunately the visuals are quite garish and busy, making it hard to see what's going on at times. It also suffers from some pretty lightweight jumping, something that seemed to plague many Amiga platform games, and the usual abomination of having to press up to jump - whoever made the decision to give the Amiga joystick one fire button should be beaten with a large stick. Putty Squad is also exceptionally hard and pretty irritating, mainly due to the aforementioned clutter on screen and spongy controls. To be perfectly honest it really shows both its age, and how far platform games have come in the last 20 years. It is worth firing up for curiosity's sake, but don't expect it to maintain your interest for more than half an hour. It has certainly made me reassess my enthusiasm for the upcoming reboot, but I will reserve judgement until I get to play it.
You can download the ROM file (in .ADF format), completely free, here
Title : Putty Squad
Developer : System 3
Year : 1994 / 2013
System : Amiga
Also on : SNES
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