Father World

When you fire up Father World, the second level becomes the only place where it's actually worth staying. Everything else is just a walk through with no interest.

It's a run-of-the-mill platformer from 1994 for DOS. You play as some guy and jump across shaky platforms, collect items, and toss grenades at enemies. The setting? Nothing special — some robotic-dystopian world with a story that won't grab you. The goal is primitive: reach the end of the level, don't fall. That's it.

The controls work, though without grace. The character moves a bit slowly, the jump has a reasonable arc, the weapon fires without a crosshair. The graphics are pixelated, but inconsistent — sometimes it looks nice, other times it's like a sketch. The sounds? Bland bleeps that you stop noticing after a while. It's not a game with bugs — it's just that the levels aren't well thought-out. You fall into gaps you can't see, and you don't know where to go next. The second level is the exception — there the design is more readable, the level flow is better, the sloppiness backs off for a bit.

Father World is forgotten by everyone. In the nineties, the market was saturated with countless better platformers — Lemmings, Commander Keen, even weaker clones had more personality. This game didn't even have the ambition to be anything more than a loud walk-through.

Today there's nothing to see in it. If you're into archaic platformers from the early nineties, go for the classics that had some substance instead. Father World offers only transparent effort — and even that often fails.