Qwak (www.qwak.co.uk) from Jamie Woodhouse, distributed via Archive Games (http://archivegames.net/), is a platformer where you take on the role of a duck and have to collect fruit, gems and keys while avoiding or egg-blasting the bad guys. By egg blasting I mean actually launching eggs at them. This kind of good-hearted fun takes me back to the days of being chased around the screen by a fried egg armed only with my wits and a pepper shaker. Now you might be one of those people where everything must be logical and are asking ‘why a duck?’ To you I simply say, why not a duck?

There are various pick ups in the game, but to find out what they all do, you’ve got to head over to the Qwak site (see above). Keys must be collected to open the exit from the level, every 10 flowers is an extra life, fruit collected turns into points and eggs (ammo), seven colored crystals give you a points bonus, skulls kill you, mushrooms switch skulls and flowers, diamonds are points (I guess) and spiked balls are bad. There are also a host of potions (buffs or power ups), locks, levers, types of eggs and other interesting things. For a small indie title, it’s got a lot of depth and variety.

The gameplay is pure platform action - jump, shoot, run. But don’t get me wrong, you’ll need to be quick and you’ll need to be on your game or the rain of spiked balls will get you. Levels have a timer after which, if you’re dawdling, which ducks tend to do sometimes, the heavy metal rain comes and you had best get a move on or your duck will be mashed flat which makes it impossible to continue play as one might imagine. From what I can tell it’s when you get all the keys and the exit is waiting for you or if there’s some task to achieve such as shoot all the baddies. The controls are configurable and I used my Cyber-Snipa gamepad to equal affect as the regular keyboard. It’s quite handy for the two-player local co-op sessions to have an extra keyboard or gamepad.