Official Review
Fast forward to 2024, and Evercade now has Amiga emulation in place, which has resulted in a second crop of Bitmap Brothers titles. The games included on the cart are Cadaver (1990), Cadaver: The Payoff (1991), Gods (1991), Magic Pockets (1991), The Chaos Engine 2 (1996) and Z (1997). Like much of the studio's output during the '90s, these six games are all uniformly excellent.
Cadaver is an isometric action adventure packed with engaging puzzles, while its expansion pack, The Payoff, is practically a full sequel and builds on the original in some brilliant ways. Gods is a stylish platformer which remains one of the company's most beloved titles, mixing intense action with devious enemy AI and challenging puzzles.
Magic Pockets was something of a deviation for the company when it arrived in 1991, as it was the Bitmap Brothers' first stab at a cute, console-style platformer (gamers in the UK may remember it being a phone-in game on the Saturday morning TV show Motormouth).
The Chaos Engine 2 is arguably the most interesting game on this cart, as it offers a very different experience from its forerunner, but was released so late in the Amiga's lifespan that few people actually got to experience it (it was also never ported to any other hardware, outside of the Amiga 32CD). You're best off experiencing this game on the Evercade VS, as it's one of the most fiendish two-player action titles of the '90s. Eschewing the cooperative approach of the original game, it forces each player to beat the other by collecting points, killing enemies, or simply killing their rival.
The most recent game on the pack is the PS1 port of Z, which launched in 1997, a year after the PC version. Fusing the company's trademark 2D artwork with RTS gameplay, Z removes the focus on resource management and instead tasks you with occupying bases and using them to build a big enough army to take down your enemy. As you might imagine, this kind of game works best with a mouse, but there are fairly intelligent shortcuts mapped to each button which makes controlling the action a little more palatable.
All of the games included here are worth a look, then, but we can't help but feel a little sad that we're not getting the chance to play the Amiga originals of titles like Speedball 2 and Xenon 2 – they could have been included as secret unlockables, perhaps. We'd also have liked to have seen the original Xenon featured here; while it's one of the company's lesser hits, it's still worth a look.
Ultimately, though, it feels silly to moan about what's not included when you look at the sheer amount of quality contained within this collection. Chaos Engine 2 alone is arguably worth the cost of entry, especially if you're able to rope in a second player – it's a game that is capable of destroying friendships and has long deserved a second chance at broader acclaim.
