Chuckie Egg has been around pretty much forever. Originating in 1983, it’s the gaming equivalent of a stegosaurus, which means Super Chuckie Egg is like a cyborg stegosaurus with a laser jetpack. Needless to say, that’s a good thing.
The game stars Harry, an intrepid chick with a penchant for golden eggs. Like the best remakes, it shares some DNA with its distant ancestor in the form of some accessible yet tricky gameplay, but it’s slick enough to appeal to modern gamers and their high tech expectations.
Your gameplay is pretty straightforward. You run left and right by swiping on the left-hand side of the screen, and you jump by tapping a button on the right.
That’s your lot as far as controls are concerned. While it might have been good to see some extra moves or special powers in there, the stripped back control scheme certainly makes the game accessible to players of all ages.
Your goal is the same in every level. Quite simply, you have to collect all of the golden eggs before your time runs out or you die. There’s a secondary bonus timer that gives you rewards for completing levels quickly, and you can slow this bonus timer down fractionally by collecting seeds.
Sounds easy, right?
Wrong. Many of the stages in Super Chuckie Egg have areas that are difficult to reach, not least because your only moves are left, right, and jump. To reach these you sometimes need to backtrack through previously traversed sections looking for alternative routes.
To make matters worse, each level is patrolled by ostriches. Ostriches that can climb ladders. The slightest glancing blow from one these looming megabirds will cost you a life, and you only have three to lose.
Fortunately, you can obtain extra lives by collecting silver eggs, which are sprinkled sparingly through every level. If you’re not in the market for lives, you can also use these eggs to instantly complete difficult stages if you collect enough of them, giving you a choice to make: do you go for gold or silver?
As you’d expect, the levels get more difficult as you move outwards from the middle of the level-select screen, but you can circumvent this system entirely by choosing Quick Play. This will drop you into a random level that you haven’t already completed, guaranteeing a stiff challenge.
Sometimes the challenge in Super Chuckie Egg can be a little too stiff, due not to tricky egg placement or perilous ostrich behavior but to the very tight, zoomed-in camera, which obscures much of the level. This can make it hard to find eggs, and from time to time you can even blunder into the void. This is always avoidable if you play carefully, but it feels unfair all the same when it happens.
Verdict
Ultimately though you’ll jump back in every time because Super Chuckie Egg is such a pleasant, charming, easygoing experience from beginning to end. From the richly detailed visuals and animations to the deceptively deep platforming gameplay, this is a great example of how to modernize a distinguished franchise.
