Batty Builders (Atari 8-bit)
When I played Hijack! for the Atari 8-bit family of computers, I had figured its problem with a jump in difficulty might have just been a misunderstanding on how to progress that game’s specific level of challenge. Two years before Hijack! though, English Software also published another arcadey action game called Batty Builders, one that seemed to have an even worse understanding of difficulty progression. While you could still say something was learned in the two years that allowed Hijack! to at least have a bit of a sweet spot in terms of its gameplay balance, Batty Builders unfortunately does not have that same benefit.
Batty Builders has you playing as the titular Batty Builder, this simple fellow in overalls tasked with building a wall out of crates that fall from a conveyor belt up above. Only one crate will ever be in play at a time, meaning whether they’re falling, in your hand, or thrown back up towards the wall you’re building, you won’t have to juggle too many concerns in the game’s first level. In fact, much like Hijack!, that first level seems to be about learning the ropes of the game, and more importantly, how precise the game expects you to be. When that crate comes careening down from above, you must be positioned pretty spot-on in its path to be able to grab it or else it will obliterate the Batty Builder. You must also time your button press so his arm raise is done at just the right moment as he will put his arms down after a bit if you’re too early and end up responsible for his own death.
The movement speed of your little worker is such that even if you stand in the middle of the screen there might be crates dropping to the left or the right you can’t reach in time and there are a finite amount of boxes dropping in from above as a bit of a limit on how sloppy you can get with the box grabbing. You have pretty much all the time you like to toss a block into the wall you’re building and there’s no time limit on the action, but there can be a point of no return if too many crates hit the ground before you’ve built up enough of the wall. You are given five lives so early on a little misalignment issue isn’t going to really doom the run, and the somewhat controllable pace of the first level also allows you to figure out the Batty Builder’s limits so that you can later do a run where the first level probably won’t involve any death at all. Getting the timing on the button press and your placement just right can still lead to a slip-up easily enough, but the wall you’re building can better become your main focus, and it’s not as straightforward as just tossing up blocks to construct it.
The blocks that drop from the conveyor belt come with different colors and patterns on them. The wall you’re building already has some blocks in place, but the wide opening is best filled with blocks that match the blocks placed beside them. If you can continue to make neat and tidy rows with consistent designs you’ll earn extra points for placing the blocks, the high score chase here often coming down to deciding if practical progress by placing blocks anywhere might outweigh the effort needed to place the blocks in tidy color-coded rows. Some issues do arise unless you’re absolutely meticulous though, the way you through blocks upwards often requiring you to stand just right if you want them to land in their desired spot in the stacks. A little off in a direction and your block that seemed like it was mostly on top of the pile you aimed for will elect instead to jerk to the side and land there. If there is no available open spot though it can instead just fall through the completed portions of the wall back towards you for a wasted block throw. In level 1 you can stand there and take the time shuffling the Batty Builder until he’s lined up just right for a perfectly safe throw that will land right where you want it, but this slow process of mostly struggling with things like hit detection isn’t the most compelling sort of game design. The risk taking and decisions on efficiency versus high score friendly preciseness requires some complicating factor beyond that threat of running out of boxes if you aren’t careful.
Unfortunately, the difficulty level of the second stage and the mostly similar levels afterwards jump too far into the deep end immediately. The area your Batty Builder runs around in is at first a simple 2D space you might not even realize allows your worker to move up and down in. The area is about three blocks high, there being no real issue with where your standing in level one vertically besides timing that button press right to accommodate. Level 2 onward introduces flying TNT that comes in from the sides, although they look more like discs with a big X drawn on them. Touching a TNT disc will cause you to instantly die and lose and box you were holding, but the problem with these TNT hazards is their size and frequency. They each are as big as a block, meaning when they fly in, they’re denying a row of moving space to your similarly sized character. These hazards will fly in usually with a few extra TNT following behind them as well as TNT in the other rows coming in at their own speed with variable timing. While this can require some pretty active scrambling to avoid that requires your full attention, it isn’t inherently flawed even at its immediately high difficulty level. It actually feels like the kind of complication the game would need to add some excitement to the wall building that asks you to actually choose where your priorities lie in building a nice uniform wall or one that just finishes the level before you die.
The issues arise in the preexisting systems that are pushed way too hard by this jump in difficulty. Already your character needs to be positioned perfectly to catch a block and throw it into the proper spots and the constant barrage of TNT makes it hard to find those moments where you can safely line up either a catch or throw. The boxes that fall to the left or right and often need you to be in that area already to have a hope of catching them can’t really be accommodated for too well when the TNT can fly in from the sides before you have time to adjust and escape. Your Batty Builder can move between the rows so he’s not fully standing in only one, meaning sometimes you need to micromanage where he stands to avoid brushing up against a hazard and dying, although it seems sometimes he can touch ones below him just fine if its with the tips of his shoes. Precision in avoiding the danger and actually catching what you need to work with could have been enough of a worry on its own, but the limited amount of blocks rubs against it in a rough way, the player locked into moments where even more boxes will be impossible to grab unless they were already positioned perfectly despite them having no way to predict the random TNT patterns or which crate will fall next.
Level 2 and the higher difficulties become pretty reliant on luck for if they’re possible even once you’ve started to master weaving through TNT. It’s not likely you’ll ever fully master it because of how precise it wants your placement for every step in building the wall, but it is possible to eat the rare loss, maybe earn an extra life if you score well enough with your block placement, and complete some later game walls because fortune smiled on how the TNT and block dropping would line up. However, putting so much focus on the fates aligning in addition to you needing to align yourself so precisely so consistently makes Batty Builders’s immediate jump in difficulty not worth the effort required to make decent progress in any stage but the first. Much like Hijack! again a gradual evolution in the systems could have made for an interesting measured climb in difficulty, but Batty Builders tosses you into the kind of challenge you aren’t really equipped to deal with and a dash of randomization over top of it so you can lose even if you play as best you can, so perhaps unsurprisingly it ends up less enjoyable than its descendant that at least had a moment where things came together nicely.
THE VERDICT: Batty Builders kicks off with a hazard-free level that lets you understand how precise you need to position your work to succeed only to then show in every level after that precision isn’t really going to be feasible as the game throws far too much danger at you at once. The incoming TNT immediately comes in far too great a number with too much randomization that previous troubles are exacerbated like blocks you literally can’t reach in time unless you were already positioned properly by a stroke of luck. The fiddly movement is compounded by hazards that don’t account for it, and while weaving through TNT like a pro can be satisfying, your goal of building the wall requires a level of performance you can’t feasibly achieve unless random factors line up properly, and even then you’ll likely have to perform things perfectly since the room for error after level 1 is far too slim.
And so, I give Batty Builders for the Atari 8-bit line of computers…
A TERRIBLE rating. I had considered being more lenient with Batty Builders because of its first level not being quite as absurdly demanding as everything after, but at the same time failure in that first stage is only really going to come down to things still out of your control like boxes you can’t reach in time or the moments where you might be a smidgen off from where you need to stand to safely grab a box. If the margin for error was a little less strict then the first level would be a bit too basic, but the threats present in it aren’t compelling and things only get far worse when level 2 introduces TNT that throws off a pretty poorly balanced system. The crates dropping in from above being limited rubs up against the constant moments where grabbing a crate is impossible in the later levels, and even if you acclimate to the movement’s demanding design then your margin of error ends up determined more often by where crates randomly drop rather than how well you dodged those TNT discs or timed your crate grabs. It’s not too hard to see some adjustments that would salvage the design, things like a more gradual growth in challenge like only a few TNT in level 2 at a time and the numbers climb the deeper you get in, but also concepts like being able to grab the crate just by touching it rather than needing to time a button press on top of being positioned below it potentially offsetting the many moments where a crate couldn’t be grabbed otherwise. It could make the game quicker to have that touch-focused grabbing system as well so that level 1’s simplicity would be easier to push through and precision in terms of tiny positioning considerations would be eliminated, and the TNT coming in as brutally as it does in level 2 would no longer be as damning to your potential success. Batty Builders in general is a concept that needs reworking from the ground up, the wall building goal and its color system not flawed but the mechanics and complications all having too many problems to really make this idea work in a satisfying manner.
Batty Builders probably would have struggled more to have that difficulty sweet spot than Hijack! with its current design concepts, but perhaps if it had come after Hijack! there might have at least been more consideration put towards a game that has a comfortable difficulty level rather than going from too tame and finicky to far too unforgiving and luck-based. Batty Builders’s design could be smoothed out with a lot of adjustments and reconsideration of the fundamental elements of its design, but that’s fairly easy to say of most terrible games. What we got was a game that overemphasizes precise control and yet challenges it with systems that clash with the possibility of achieving such precision, so Batty Builders hardly deserves a second glance even if its first stage is nearly tolerable.