Gremlin Graphics‘ lollipop-endorsing, ninja hero Zool was in our faces all throughout the early ’90s. He was supposed to be a kind of ‘anti-hero alien ninja’ to mirror the ‘coolness’ of Sega‘s Sonic the Hedgehog, but only made relatively minor inroads into gaming history with two games that originated on the Amiga then were later ported to a variety of different platforms. Zool 2 was converted to the Jaguar by Imagitech Design and was released in North America and Europe in 1994, and later in Japan, in 1995.

The game can be played either as Zool – the male ninja – or as ‘Zooz‘, his female sidekick, and is a platform game where you must run, jump, climb, slide, spin and shoot your way through a variety of brightly-coloured levels, collecting ‘tokens’ as you go. The Zool 2 manual says that you “need to collect 99% of the tokens found on each level before you will be allowed to leave“, but that is wrong. While the game does require a certain number of tokens to be collected before you can exit a level, collecting 99% of them would be almost impossible – there just are so many of them!

Zool and Zooz each have a five point health bar and colliding with hostiles will reduce it by one. If the health bar is reduced to zero you lose a life. It can, however, be replenished by collecting bonus hearts that are sometimes dropped by defeated enemies.

You can also pick up useful bonuses like bombs (that will follow you until you use them – pressing the ‘C’ button will explode them and kill all enemies on-screen); super shots (allows you to fire a spinning missile); ying/yangs (that will make your partner appear for “double the action”, whatever that means); shields (makes you invincible for a short while); clocks (which add more time to the level timer), and “Chupa Chups” (which restore your ninja to full health).

Each level is timed and there is a boss battle at the end of each world. There’s also a bonus stage that can be accessed by collecting three “Zoons” (Zoon being the ninja pair’s two-headed pet dog), and which is a Breakout-style minigame.

Zool 2 is an improvement over the first Zool, with larger levels, more detail and better controls, but it’s not a game that will appeal to everyone. For some people it will be too chaotic and annoying. It’s obviously aimed at a younger audience, who will likely enjoy its non-stop cartoon sound effects and cute characters, but older gamers will likely scrunch their nose up at it.

More: Zool 2 on Wikipedia