Whilst it’s not my most defining early-gaming memory, I do remember playing the original Lemmings back on our family’s first PC. It ran entirely off floppy disks with no hard drive, because the hard drive was a passing fad, you see. The series has seen several iterations over the years, and the latest title to carry on the legacy is the Vita’s Lemmings Touch.
Now admittedly I haven’t played any Lemmings titles since the first back on the PC, but the gameplay seems pretty much the same. Lemmings appear, you guide them from A to B by tasking them with various skills – Stair-Builders, Diggers, Umbrella-Floaters and so on – to stop them from ineptly throwing themselves to their doom. In a clever twist, a new ‘troublemaker’ type of Lemming must be purposefully eliminated before reaching the level goal, or they will sabotage it and cause you to fail the level.
The big new twist for Lemmings Touch is that — as its name implies — you operate the game using the Vita’s touchscreen. Other than pausing and fast-forwarding the action and scrolling across the level map, all actions are undertaken with a tap-and-swipe touchscreen interface. To assign a Lemming a role, you tap on them to open a wheel of options. Each level will have a specific set of roles available, and a limited number of uses for each. Often this is more than you will need, so the real trick is finding the right placement and combination of roles to solve the level effectively.
Whilst the touch interface sounds great on face value for a game all about timely execution, I actually found it to be ineffective. The detection zones for activating objects seems to be too narrow in many instances – in early levels, I found it hard to make the game notice that I was trying to start the level by tapping on the Lemming-dispenser. This same object also houses a slider that modifies how quickly the lemmings are dropped into the world, and the swipe action for this seemed to only understand my intentions half the time. Other objects such as adjustable-angle cannons and bounce-pads did not seem to have the same issues, so it seems puzzling that the dispenser was made so small when it is expected to have two functions.
The game also has a very ‘mobile game’ feel with challenges to complete, independent of each level’s objectives. These include objectives such as using the same Lemming to execute multiple roles, using certain roles in certain ways, and so on. The completion of each task earns you coins, which can be spent on another new element to the game – customizable costumes for the Lemmings themselves. This doesn’t change anything about the game itself however, and frustratingly when you shop for these customisations you’re not able to see the result until AFTER you’ve paid for it. When most of these items cost the equivalent of several challenge rewards from the get-go, it’s a hard sell for a ‘fun little add-on’.
Visually, the game is strikingly similar to the Lemmings title on Playstation mobile, which was also handled by the same team (d3t Ltd). Touch’s Lemmings are more detailed with a default green-Bieber bowl cut, but the background elements seem almost interchangeable between the two titles which were released two years apart. Whether this is an adherence to the existing visual style or an actual reuse of art elements is unclear, but seeing screenshots of the two games next to each other makes it hard to separate them.
That’s not to say the game isn’t fun, of course. Despite all these gripes, the game IS at its core the Lemmings experience you know and love, if you are a fan. There’s all the challenge and pin-point precision that is emblematic of the series, even if it feels like this particular iteration was designed more for a mobile phone than the Vita.
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