Trampoline Terror! (Genesis/Mega Drive)
Trampoline Terror is certainly an odd pair of words, one made even stranger when you realize the name isn’t referring to the situation the player finds themselves in but instead to the game’s main character.
The Trampoline Terror is indeed the protagonist of his self-titled adventure, a gymnast so skillful that he’s even become friends with royalty. Trampoline Terror! keeps most of its plot details in the instruction manual, to the point where the first time you see the queen you are meant to be saving in game is in the final cutscene. An alien invasion by the Balos empire threatens the planet Ahas with a strange fortress built around the planet to block out the sun, this multi-layered grid containing evil enemies, explosive switches, and for some reason plenty of trampolines, making it the perfect job for a hero whose whole gimmick is bouncing off of trampolines. With Queen Carina captured and the planet at risk of freezing, Trampoline Terror bounces into action, needing to clear 33 levels to truly save Ahas and Carina.
The levels in Trampoline Terror! are viewed with a top down perspective, each of them built off of a 16 by 16 grid pattern where the squares are filled in with regular platforms, trampolines, the switches you need to press, or open space that reveals the detailed backgrounds you’ll plummet towards if you jump overboard to your doom. Despite there being limited dimensions for the playfield, Trampoline Terror! manages to make some levels that feel rather large, partly because the tiles themselves are sizable but also because the level wraps around, meaning you are essentially moving around a sphere despite the flat presentation of the game grid. The 33 levels in the game manage to concoct many different arrangements that never feel too similar once you leave the early introductory levels, the square arrangements managing to be quite flexible despite only drawing on a few tile types.
The level of variety mostly comes down to the interaction between the tiles and enemies. The most important tiles in the game are the switches, a level only complete once you’ve activated every switch panel in the stage. All that is necessary to turn one on is walking over it, the tile detonating shortly after to encourage you to keep moving while also leading to minor alterations to level layouts. The tiles come in four different colors, those being red, yellow, blue, and green, and if the player can manage to blow up multiple switches of the same color in a row, they can activate additional effects. Mostly these are simple boosts to the score you build up over the game, but Red switches can end up clearing away enemies and Green switches can repair damaged trampolines, with other bonuses like invincibility and extra lives earned through consecutive switch pressing as well. Wandering around a level and trying to clear switches in certain orders for the goodies enhances an already somewhat satisfying gameplay style where you need to explore and learn the layout to figure out how to go about clearing the grid, but in later levels, these extra abilities from consecutive switch activation can even become vital parts of solving a level puzzle, the game itself being a rather odd mix of action, puzzles, and platforming that doesn’t feel like it slots into any single genre too easily.
The switches are definitely the most important part of the gameplay, but the trampolines are unsurprisingly very important in Trampoline Terror! The titular protagonist, despite being a phenomenal gymnast supposedly, can’t even clear a single square wide gap with his jump, and while he can leap diagonally to cross tiles connected at the corner, to get across the majority of the gaps in game requires him to make use of the trampolines found across the levels. With a well timed press of the jump button, Trampoline Terror will make a much larger jump, the player expected to make frequent and even consecutive use of this in the later levels despite the timing being slightly strict. It’s somewhat easy to leap off a trampoline without the proper bounce and end up plummeting to your death, and while the levels do gradually train you up to the cases where it becomes much more important to bounce from trampoline to trampoline, there is an important consideration when using a trampoline. The trampolines come in many different colors as well, but these indicate their durability. Any time you bounce on one, it’s color will change to indicate it is getting closer to breaking, colors ranging from a healthy green to an about-to-break red. Any time you jump while on a trampoline or end up landing on one after a jump you will spring up and lightly damage it, so dilly-dallying on one jeopardizes its use for later navigation.
Fast-paced movement helps you avoid wasting precious trampolines, but it also is encouraged by the game’s use of enemies. While figuring out a level layout and how you want to activate the switches is a fun test for the mind, the enemies moving around the grid provide the danger you’ll need to avoid while executing your vital switch-flipping strategies. The various aliens you face are well tailored to the game’s level designs and goals, ensuring that you’ll either need to move smart to get around them or find a way to deal with them to open up the grid for safer traversal. Turtles and soldiers will both follow the player around, something that isn’t too bothersome in the larger grids but can end up denying entire routes when you get to the thinner strips of squares in later stages. UFOs move freely between squares, able to follow you even if you jump between areas, but the bullet-like enemies are definitely the most persistent and troublesome. Moving quickly and constantly chasing you, the bullets can only move a set amount of squares at a time, meaning you can find safe tiles to rest on while they fail to close in, but if you’re in their line of sight, you are going to have to move quick to avoid being attacked. With weird cloaked figures that teleport in and out to suddenly block your progress and rotating faces that require good timing to get past, there are plenty of enemies who make certain level designs more interesting and dangerous while others are focused on more traditional action game danger by chasing you down. You do have a few ways to potentially defeat enemies though, such as the P-Ball, a pinball bumper shaped object you can find laying around levels to toss onto baddies to beat them. These come in limited quantities and can be picked up after use, but they also bounce across trampolines and are lost if they go over an edge, meaning that some areas will test you by providing you only one P-Ball or not even providing that. Switch detonations, switch chains, and breaking trampolines can kill enemies too or deny them the room to move, but even if an enemy is defeated, they’ll reappear a short time later, meaning you’ll never get too long of a break from having to stay involved and active.
Trampoline Terror! only features one boss, but the level designs make up for the lack of bombastic battles by providing plenty of different uses of the core ingredients. The difficulty curve makes the early levels pretty brisk and easy to complete but the final ones require not only skill with movement and trampoline use, but the understanding of the game’s mechanics like the switch effects and that you can walk around the edges of them to use a switch platform without activating it. Even at its easiest it has still got the simple satisfaction of intelligent action, but getting in deeper reveals the many challenging ways the grid can be arranged. There is the occasional over-reliance on trampolines and a few levels you’re likely to die in as you learn what you’re meant to do, the enemy pressure making the level scouting in some areas harder than it probably needed to be. Trampoline Terror! does wisely hold onto different enemy types, teleporting and disappearing tiles, and other small features until later levels to ensure the variety doesn’t just come from interesting level layouts though, repetition not likely to sink in thanks to the new introductions and how most levels don’t even take that long to complete once you know how to approach activating the switches.
THE VERDICT: Despite the odd name, Trampoline Terror! manages to concoct a gameplay style that works pretty well. The grid based levels make good use of a few tile types and a variety of enemies to make stages that require active play while also touching on strategic planning for your movement. The need to chain switch activations, manage trampolines, and deal with the enemy obstacles makes for a good mixture of action and smart level traversal while a brisk pace keeps you moving through areas quickly to tackle new and interesting layouts. Having to learn some stage layouts by dying to them is unfortunate, and the game does lean a little hard into the slightly finicky trampoline controls on occasion, but there is always enough going on in Trampoline Terror! that it never gets dull, the tile types surprisingly flexible and the grids the right size to ensure stages don’t play too similarly.
And so, I give Trampoline Terror! for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…
A GOOD rating. Released only in the United States, Trampoline Terror! probably missed out on being appreciated due to its limited release, strange name, and atypical game concept. However, if Trampoline Terror! is given a chance, it’s got a good mix of action and planning to its play, its short levels having enough substance to them to make playing them enjoyable but not locking a player into an area where they’ll have to overcome too much to continue. It still manages a good level of difficulty as it progresses thanks to the interplay of the tile types and your opposition, with the enemies perhaps the main reason Trampoline Terror! remains interesting until the end. Figuring out the best route is one thing, but having to weave through UFOs or dodge the aggressive bullets keeps you active and adds pressure to level designs that might have been too simple otherwise, and save for the later levels where the P-Ball is withheld, it does a good job of providing an effective attack method but one you can’t use carelessly or else you risk losing it. The timing on trampoline jumps definitely could use a bit more leniency, especially since some of the last levels in the game requires you to almost exclusively use them for traversal, but a few rougher level designs don’t detract from a generally good selection of stages that fit the game’s mechanics pretty well.
Save for the potential to get hung up on the more difficult later stages, Trampoline Terror! is fairly short, and it does feel short as well. It iterates on its core design enough in the space it fills and never loses its luster, but it would have definitely benefited from more levels to keep growing into a more full-bodied title. It does what it’s aiming to do well, but besides the weird name, Trampoline Terror! might have been skipped by many because the breezy pace of progression that makes the levels work so well also makes it less meaty than its contemporaries. Trampoline Terror! remains an odd but interesting game despite its short length, but it is through how it used its components so well that it ends up feeling like a game that could have soared to new heights if it had just kept going.