Boulder Dash Deluxe

I've been a fan of Boulder Dash since I played it way back when on my Atari 800 in the mid-80s. Yep! This version of BD seems to keep with the original spirit of the game but is re-imagined for the modern day. Graphics are good, sound effects are good, music is OK. The character animations are great! Some people don't like the different animals that replaced the pulsating squares but I think they are fine. From technical perspective, the game is all good! I like to think of the caves as puzzles to be solved and mysteries to be unlocked. The first few worlds and caves are actually pretty simple. That's fine. It allows the player to learn the dynamics of the game without getting frustrated. Then, somewhere halfway through all the worlds and caves, the puzzles get more difficult. In fact, some are really difficult! They seem to have one unique and special way to be solved. Either find that way or load up on dynamite sticks to blow up boulders, snow flakes to freeze time, and gold bars to get another life in the cave plus 60 seconds. I found myself going back to caves I had solved to play them just for these pieces. Cave 8 in the Macmarnua Sea world was my go-to cave for collecting treasures. It was simple enough to blast through and provides lots of treasure chests. Caves 1-7 didn't give me anything. This was tedious. I would rather have wanted simpler caves that have more that one way to be solved but with higher thresholds for 2 and 3 star success. I have one cave that I cannot finish for the life of me, Cave 15 in the Monngo Mountains. It's just not happening. Otherwise, I slaved through them all! Another downside ... even after finishing all but one cave in the whole game I cannot obtain all the relics. I can keep going back to my "Cave 8" and play it ad nauseam. That would give me my relics. The game is smart enough to not give me anything but what I am missing for those relics. That's a bit much for me for now. There are plenty of bugs in the game. Some examples : 1) The game never saves my screen resolution and refresh settings. 2) Sometimes the item count from my treasure finds don't increment. Suppose I have 7 snow flakes and a chest gives me 3 more. I don't see my snowflake count go up to 10. 3) The field of view setting is constantly getting reset. I like to play with a narrow field, to feel zoomed in. Affter bonking out in a cave, the game zooms out. When I reenter the cave, I am not zoomed back in. Instead, I stay at the zoomed out view. 4) Lots of glitches and artifacts! I drop a boulder down the middle of my screen but I see a reflection or a mirror of it on the far left hand size of my screen? Whaaa? It's hard to reproduce but when it happens its pretty bad. 5) Play the last cave, Cave 20, in each world to have the whole world marked as "complete". You can skip cave 19, 18, 17, etc. I would love to see a cave editor and creator where we can create caves and share them. Otherwise, I have to wait and see if the publishers will offer new challenges. Overall, I would recommend this game to fans of the original BD and I would recommend certain players try this for the right price. I'm happy with this game even with its minues but that's me.