Review: GLUF

Review: GLUF

By Denis Grachev, Retrosouls

GLUF is essentially an action packed painter-platform game with baddies that patrol horizontally, vertically, jump about, chase you and use lifts. That may be an already crowded genre, but GLUF has enough quality, playability, and personality to make it noteworthy. It's also a multicolour game, and of the 18 released so far, it's the most fluid and action packed of the lot. It is down to clever design, but there is nothing here that feels compromised by the burden of a multicolour engine. It even manages vertical scrolling nicely.

GLUF, the "Tesla Frog", must charge up on the battery, and release it onto the dead cells. This concept started as a UDG BASIC game devised during 1997, and what it finally became would have been inconceivable to anyone at the time. Hell - it's impressive enough now and we've had 8 years to habituate to multicolour trickery.

Over the 25 levels, we are treated to two great AY tracks that are catchy enough to dislodge even the most stubbornly embedded "Come on Eileen" from your head. The most notable is a version of "Leva's Polka", a Finnish folksong that somehow became the Leekspin internet meme.

If the game is lacking anything, then it's variety in the level design. It's fine, and it does develop as the game progresses, but there is a slight saminess to some of it. It certainly didn't stop me wanting to complete it.

Denis, like all Russian coders, is probably doping in order to achieve these feats (just look at the 2019 Yandex comp!), but that doesn't change the fact that it's an astonishing achievement. There have been several evolutionary jumps in multicolour games over recent years, and GLUF is the latest. So here and now, we should plant a golden spike in the ground to mark it.