Lemmings 2: The Tribes

Lemmings 2: The Tribes
Cover art for Lemmings 2
Developer(s)	DMA Design
Publisher(s)	Psygnosis
Platforms	Commodore Amiga, DOS, Mega Drive, Super NES, Game Boy, Acorn Archimedes, Atari ST, FM Towns, Master System, Game Gear
Release date(s)	1993
Genre(s)	Puzzle
Mode(s)	Single player

Lemmings 2: The Tribes, a computer game released in 1993, is the first real sequel to the popular puzzle game Lemmings. As with the original, it was developed by DMA Design and published by Psygnosis. The gameplay remains mostly the same as the original game, requiring the player to lead a certain number of lemmings to their exit by giving them the appropriate "skills".

Storyline

There is an introduction movie explaining the storyline of the game. Once upon a time, the twelve lemming tribes of Lemming Island lived joyfully and peacefully. However, an ancient prophecy foretells a great darkness soon to cover the island. This prophecy tells that the only way the lemmings can live is by getting off their island, using the power of the Lemming Talisman. This talisman consists of twelve pieces, one owned by each tribe. With the help of the Guide that has helped them before (referring to the player in the previous Lemmings game), all lemmings must now reach the center point of their island in order to escape their doom.

Gameplay

Level 1 of the Beach tribe. Tanned beach bum lemmings can be seen walking about. The upper left one has just been made a SuperLem, while the one to the far right has been given the permanent skill of Runner

There are many more skills available in Lemmings 2: 51 in total (although no more than eight are available in each level), as compared to eight in the original game. Some of the skills are similar to the original ones (like digging and building variants), while others are all new (several flying skills, for example). One skill, the "attractor", will cause the lemming to play a musical instrument and have nearby lemmings stop walking to do a dance. The instrument and dances performed vary by tribe.

A practice mode has also been added. In this mode, any type of skill available can be selected for the player to experiment with. There is a choice of four different practice levels.

There is still a total of 120 levels, but in this game they are divided into ten levels for each of twelve tribes. Each tribe's levels can be started at any time, and progress can be saved from the main menu. The player starts out with 60 lemmings for each tribe, but only one lemming needs to make it to an exit in order to progress to next level. The amount saved will then be the amount left in the next level. As some levels may require several lemmings to complete, the player might have to replay an earlier level to save more lemmings for the following ones if they realize they do not have enough.

The player will be rewarded with a bronze, silver or gold medal, depending on how many lemmings are saved in the level. This will also dictate the type of the talisman part received once all the tribe's levels are completed. To watch the outro and credits, all golden talisman parts need to be won by rescuing enough lemmings from each tribe.

A new fast forward button and fan button have been added to the controls. The fast forward replaces the release rate button in the original game, which would let the player release more lemmings at a time. The fan button turns the cursor into a fan, which is used to push around any flying lemmings or to affect wind-powered elements.

Smaller additions include:

• When falling from moderate heights, instead of just dying, lemmings will now stun themselves upon landing, taking a second to get back up to continue walking. (Lemmings will still die instantly from higher falls.)
• Trampolines will let lemmings jump and bounce about.
• Cannons and catapults in levels will launch a lemming away.
• Lemmings can grab on wind-powered swing ropes to allow them to travel across gaps.
• Levels can span vertically as well as horizontally (mostly because of the flying skills).
• Lemmings with permanent skills have their colours switched for easier identification.
• Lemmings caught in explosions will be temporarily stunned.

Skills

The various skills that the Lemmings are given can be broken into three different classes, referred to here as permanent, continuous, and temporary skills.

The permanent skills are irreversible enhancements to the behaviour of a lemming, staying with the lemming until the end of the level. When a lemming is given a permanent skill, their hair and shirt colours are swapped to make them easier to identify. An example of a permanent skill is the runner, which makes the selected lemming run for the rest of the level, and jump over small gaps.

Continuous skills are those that a lemming will continue doing until it is ordered to do something else, encounters an obstacle, or reaches the end of the appropriate terrain. An example of a continuous skill is the fencer, which gives the selected lemming a small sword, and enables it to dig a tunnel on a slight upward slant until there is no more dirt, or until the sword hits something more solid than dirt.

Temporary skills are carried out until given another order, just like continuous skills, but also have an upper limit on how long the lemming will keep doing the skill. This may be due to a lemming running out of materials, or simply because there is a time limit on how long the skill can be used for. An example of a temporary skill is the laser blaster, which allows a lemming to make a vertical tunnel slowly blasting upwards. The laser beam has a long but limited range, and is only activated for a limited time.

An alternative (and overlapping) grouping of skills can be made in terms of what they do to the surrounding environment. There are building skills, which add bits that other lemmings can walk over (e.g. planter, filler), removal skills, which remove pieces of ground (e.g. bazooka, twister), movement skills, which alter the way a lemming moves through its environment (e.g. roller, diver), shooting skills, which cause a lemming to fire a projectile (e.g. archer, bazooka), and wind skills, which cause the lemming to be influenced by the fan in some way (e.g. Icarus wings, twister).

Tribes

There are a total of 12 tribes in the game: Classic, Circus, Cavelem, Shadow, Space, Outdoor, Beach, Sports, Egyptian, Highland, Polar and Medieval. While the twelve different tribes of Lemmings will generally have a set of skills that are more commonly associated with that tribe, there can be overlap between the available skill sets of each tribe. Each tribe will typically have its own style of traps (for example, space lemmings can be killed by an open airlock, while outdoor lemmings must avoid being eaten by a frog), and levels are designed in a way that complements the tribe. Apart from that, each tribe has its own skin and clothing colors, its own entrance, its own entry and exit method, its own music, and, except for Classic, its own style of dancing (for the attractor skill).

Keeping with Psygnosis's tradition of including references to their earlier games, some levels of the Space tribe include the Walker robot from Walker as a hazard.

Functional differences

There are no functional differences between the tribes, save for the "classic" tribe which has had many of the new gameplay features turned off in order to play similarly to the original game. In this tribe, the exploder follows the "classic" explosion type of previous Lemmings games, with the Lemming stopping at the end of the countdown for a couple of seconds before exploding into a shower of debris. While the Lemming is stopped, other lemmings can pass behind it (even if the lemming was a blocker prior to being an exploder). Skill sets for this tribe are restricted to the skills from the previous Lemmings games (climber, floater, exploder, blocker, builder, basher, miner, and digger), making gameplay for this tribe fairly similar to that in Lemmings.

Cosmetic differences

Most tribes have green hair, white skin, and blue clothes (just like in the original Lemmings games). Exceptions to this include the beach tribe (tan skin, as they get the most sun), the polar tribe (light blue hair, a reflection of the cold environment they live in), the highlands tribe (orange hair, a stereotype associated with the Scottish Highlands), and the shadow tribe (black hair and tan skin).

The music and dance style of the tribes also reflect the nature of the tribes. The background music from the sports tribe has a very vibrant, bouncy beat, and the entertainer from the medieval tribe plays a few notes on a lute.

Methods of entry and exit also differ between tribes. The entrances are usually in the form of trapdoors with two flaps that drop down, but can differ a bit from this — there is an upturned barrel used by the highland lemmings, and a dragon's head that is used by the medieval tribe. Lemmings from the circus tribe carry out a bouncing turn before heading off into the next level, while Lemmings from the space tribe float away behind a planet.

Development

Mike Dailly, programmer at DMA Design, compared Lemmings 2 to its predecessor in 2015: "Lemmings 2 was a different beast, the tech was much more complex, but designed to make console versions much better. I think it had too many skills, but the underlying tech was great. I was given the SNES version to do, and it was one of the most complex games I’ve had to write. Some complex internals that had to run quick on a 3.5Mhz chip. Tricky stuff – but fun!"

Ports

Known ports of the Amiga game include: DOS, Mega Drive, Super NES, Game Boy, Acorn Archimedes, Atari ST and FM Towns. The Amiga CD32 version was cancelled. Ports to the Master System and Game Gear were completed along with the Game Boy version but never released commercially.

The next game in the Lemmings series after Lemmings 2 is All New World of Lemmings (1994), which continues the storyline with the Egyptian, Shadow and Classic tribes.

Reception

Lemmings 2 was not quite as popular as Lemmings was, nor was it ported to as many platforms.

The game was well received by critics, who widely considered it to be better than the original game. Bruce and Margaret Howden of Compute! commented "This sequel is packed with cute, engaging new features, more Lemming abilities, and oodles of new scenarios. If the original Lemmings was a perfect arcade game, then this is perfection improved upon." Computer Gaming World stated that Psygnosis had done "a first rate job with this sequel ... Lemmings 2 really is twice the game its predecessor was", with "lovingly designed" puzzles and "delightful animations", and concluded that it would be one of the "better purchases of the year".

Reviewing the Genesis version, GamePro commented that the controls themselves are easy to use but the small size of the lemmings makes it difficult to control them with any precision. However, they praised the variety and creativity of the level design and the different lemming maneuvers, as well as the game's "charming" personality and wide range of difficulty, and gave it an overall recommendation. They made similar comments of the Super NES version, and remarked that the game "adds nonlinear variety to the cartoony brainteasers mix."

In a 2001 retrospective review, Rosemary Young wrote in Quandary that "Lemmings 2: Tribes will be hard to find now because of its age but, really, it's hardly aged at all. Although a little 'flat' the graphics are still perfectly good and the puzzles are just as fiendish. It compares very well with later Lemmings titles such as 3D Lemmings and Lemmings Revolution even if it doesn't offer the opportunity to save mid level."

External links

• Lemmings 2: The Tribes at MobyGames
• Lemmings 2: The Tribes can be played for free in the browser at the Internet Archive
• http://www.psygnosis.org/games/lemmings2/ - Lemmings 2 game materials, on unofficial archive site psygnosis.org