Dragon Dragon Fire Fire Deluxe

It used to be that you could fit an entire video game level on a single screen. Games like Donkey Kong, BurgerTime and Bubble Bobble found mass appeal thanks to lovable characters who could overcome deceptively challenging stages that fit snugly in a single low-resolution frame. The new game Dragon Dragon Fire Fire Deluxe is a loving tribute to those old school arcade games from the 1980s. It’s a surprisingly authentic throwback experience that combines the best elements from those single-screen classics and gives us something that is simultaneously new and old at the exact same time. Will that be enough to satisfy today’s demanding gamers? That’s what we’re about to find out when I review Dragon Dragon Fire Fire Deluxe.

It would be easy to call Dragon Dragon Fire Fire Deluxe a Bubble Bobble rip-off, but that would be selling it short. This is a game starring a pair of dragons who, as the title suggests, shoot fireballs in order to take out a bunch of pixel monsters. The goal is to clear each stage of bad guys and pick up as much loot as you can before our dragon heroes summersault their way into the next stage. Complete twenty (or so) of these stages before either running out of time or lives and you’ll move on to the next world, where you’ll go up against a whole new set of enemies and obstacles.

One of the reasons why Bubble Bobble was so beloved at the time is because it found a way to add a little extra depth to its bubble-blowing mechanic. First, you would have to trap your enemies in those bubbles, then you would have to smack into or bounce on them in order to take them out. This simple change added a whole new strategy to gameplay, and the same is true with Dragon Dragon Fire Fire Deluxe.

The first fireball will often ignite the bad guy in flames, sending them racing in the opposite direction. You could, in theory, just wait for the flames to fully engulf the monster and reduce them to ash, but that’s slow, so you’re going to want to race after them to get that second kill-shot. However, there may be an advantage of letting the on-fire foe scurry off, because they’ll quickly spread the flames to other enemies as they pass by. It may be faster to double tap an enemy in order to get it off the board, but it might make more sense to let the little guy spread the fire across the level.

And what makes this game stand out is that it’s not just the enemies that catch fire, but also the platforms. Much like BurgerTime, players can destroy parts of the stage in order to send platforms crashing to the ground, defeating any monster that’s standing under it. This adds a whole new tactic that a lot of the levels are built around. Sometimes you’ll want to keep those platforms in place, allowing you to reach extra lives and out-of-the-way enemies. However, there are just as many times when you’re going to want to use the platforms like a weapon, smashing everything in its path (including our dragon heroes).

Believe it or not, the toughest enemy in this game isn’t one of the pixel monsters, but rather it’s the timer. This is the kind of game that doesn’t give you enough time to actually beat every single level in a world, so the player will need to race around the screen picking up clocks that will add a few seconds to your overall time. This is why you don’t want to just wait for the fire to char your enemies, because that clock is always ticking. No matter if you’re on the very last stage, when your time runs out, it’s back to the very start to try it all over again.

The good news is that there are eight worlds, each with either twenty or more levels to fight through. Because everything is separated into chunks, each world feels like a race to the finish line. This separation also allows the developer to make the eight worlds feel noticeably different from one another. You’ll encounter new types of enemies and obstacles as you go along, including ghosts and locked doors you’ll need to open. There are around 200 of these individual, single-screen stages, with some of the later ones demanding some real precision from the player.

In a word, Dragon Dragon Fire Fire Deluxe is “charming.” Even when some of the later levels were kicking my butt, I never got bored of setting fire to both the enemies and the stages. Had this game been released back in the mid-1980s, it would have been a massive hit, right up there with Bubble Bobble. It’s the kind of simple game that anybody can get into that is also somehow deep enough to keep you playing through to the end. If you grew up loving this type of single-screen action game, then you’re going to have a great time with this throwback.

The only real downside with the game is that it won’t take you very long to play through the 200 stages. Even though the final two worlds are extremely challenging, they won’t be too much for the experienced gamer. The good news is that each of the eight worlds has its own leaderboard, so there’s at least a little incentive to go back through and fight for first place. There’s also a score attack mode, which opens up the game in a whole new way.

While bite-sized, Dragon Dragon Fire Fire Deluxe does everything it’s supposed to do. It has a bunch of levels to fight through, all kinds of unique enemies, a couple modes and endless two-player fun. Best of all, it’s only five dollars. It’s a charming throwback game that perfectly mimics the classics, while at the same time bringing something new to the genre. As far as I’m concerned, Dragon Dragon Fire Fire Deluxe is a much better follow-up to Bubble Bobble than Rainbow Islands.