Sol Negro (Amiga)

I decided to play this game based entirely on the boxart, which featured the hero and heroine looking like they were from some cool european sci-fi action comic. Though the cover wasn't a total bait-and-switch, as those two characters are actually the protagonists, the world they inhabit is more like an uglier, more luridly coloured version of a nineties platformer world. More interesting is the story, which is a rip-off of the story from the 1985 fantasy movie Ladyhawke. Ladyhawke, if you don't know, is about a warrior and a lady who love each other, but are kept apart by a curse that means when he's a human, she's a hawk, and when she's a human he's a wolf. The main characters in Sol Negro have a similar dilemma, except that the guy in this case turns into a fish. Also they'e both rifle-toting post-apocalyptic soldiers.

So, at the start of the game, you pick one of the characters, who you play as in human form, while rescuing/protecting the other, who obviously appears in their animal form. The most interesting thing about this is that it means each character has different stages: the male character starts the game in a surreal place with mountains and giant mushrooms and flowers, while the female character starts under the sea. Beyond that, however, I can't tell you any more, since this is yet another Amiga game, that's absurdly difficult, and after many attempts, I never made it past either character's first stages.

The game's mechanics are as much of a rip-off as its story, as it sees you walking and flying along narrow horizontally-scrolling stages shooting groups of small enemies, a lot like the arcade game Atomic Robo-Kid (in the interests of fairness, it should be mentioned that Atomic Robo-Kid and Sol Negro were released in the same year, and the Amiga version of ARK didn't even come out until two years later, so the similarities might just be a coincidence). Though obviously, Atomic Robo-Kid is a lot better than this in pretty much every way. Sol Negro has terrible collision detection, pointless non-enemy characters that do nothing but float around making you wonder what you're supposed to shoot, and various other problems. The most hateful of all, I think, is the dolphin that appears in the female character's underwater stage: it can't hurt you, but unlike all the other peaceful characters, if you accidentally shoot it, a bunch of tridents fly in from off screen and kill you as punishment.

In summary, Sol Negro is a bad game, despite having unique presentation and an endearingly shameless/bizarre plot. Just play Atomic Robo-Kid instead, to be honest.