I was pretty excited to get my hands on Pinobee, I should tell you. Despite some lukewarm reviews and complaints about the difficulty (or lack thereof), Pinobee comes from a new and very promising developer, Artoon, and packs a lot of style and guts for a simple platformer. I remember writing our Pinobee preview a long time ago, and despite our limited knowledge of the gameplay mechanics, it certainly looked interesting.

Well, interesting it is. Sonic it ain't. The first thing that hit me about the Pinobee gameplay is that it's slow...painfully slow. Or at least it starts out that way. The game is also deeper than I first suspected, but it's still pretty shallow compared to some other early GBA games. Ya know, the fact that you don't even use the B-button to play, much less the shoulder triggers, was probably not a great design choice. There is certainly more to Pinobee than jumping, mainly because of the Dash move, but controlling an entire game with a single button just feels wrong, and worse yet, it gets stale.

There is much to be happy about though. While the first few stages are pitifully easy, the challenge picks up later on. (I'm currently on level 10, which I think is about halfway through the game.) In most platformers, the enemies get tougher as you progress. That holds true for Pinobee as well, but there's an impressive twist to the formula. In each level is a golden enemy, tougher than the rest; kill it, and the enemies won't "evolve" when you enter the next level. That's a good incentive too, because left unchecked, some of these baddies can get really hard later on. Still, most of the challenge comes not from combat but from the level design, and I commend Artoon for that. Water, spikes, conveyer belts, spring platforms, cannons...all of them will affect the way you make it through the level, and your ability to negotiate them will determine whether you live or die. There don't seem to be any bottomless pits, but the environmental hazard factor is much bigger than in, for instance, a Mario game.

Pinobee got a lot of attention early in its life for its amazing screenshots. I'm sorry to say that the graphics look better in still pictures than in motion, although they're still very stylized and occasionally impressive. The color depth seems to have taken a hit since those original images though, and the prerendered characters and environments look a little blurry in motion. Parallax scrolling helps though, and every level has at least two or three layers of background, much of it looking very organic and perhaps even captured from real backyard elements. (The game takes place in a meadow, as near as I can tell.)

The music is appropriate and slightly catchy, but it seems like the same song is playing in every stage. If something new doesn't present itself soon, I'll have to just kill the volume and start up some Floyd.

So far Pinobee: Wings of Adventure is a neat little title with simple but fun gameplay and a terribly corny story. We'll see how long it can last, what new gameplay experiences it can offer as you progress, and whether I can be arsed to go back and collect all these little Bingo items. Don't ask.