The entire idea behind the story of Commander Keen is one common enough amongst young children; most games I played as involved shooting imaginary aliens and being generally heroic. As an adult, it's a bit hard to swallow the concept of a child as young Commander Keen adventuring as he does (even if he is a boy genius akin to Jimmy Neutron!), yet it is this setting that encourages children to let their imagine run free.
In the game, you control Billy, also known as Commander Keen, a boy genius.
After Billy crash lands on Mars, it is your task to lead him over the planet, exploring various levels in a quest to retrieve the parts of his space ship so that Billy can make it home for dinner! You encounter Big Bad Wolves, strange green eye stalked monsters, robots, and many more enemies to defeat with your trusty ray gun.
Considering the age of the game, the graphics are quite good. Whilst traversing the map to go to new levels, you are shown a top down view of Mars; volcanoes, your (broken) space ship and levels you must pass through. In the levels, the gameplay is classical side scrolling action; jumping, shooting and collecting items for massive bonus points. The colours, whilst nothing compared to modern
day games, are bright and colourful, and appealing to young children.
The sound isn't the best; the beeps and boops and buzzing from the tower speaker can be annoying a lot of the time, even antagonistic. The sound is easy to turn off, yet seems to take some life out of the game.
Controls are simple. There is no duck, no reload, no unlock. Only moving backwards and forwards, jumping and shooting. The controls are very easy to pick up; I remember playing this once at my friend's house at a very young age, and I managed to pick up the controls in less than an hour.
Overall, I would say the Commander Keen is one of the great PC platformers, along with Jazz Jackrabbit and other popular PC platformers. The fact that Commander Keen has more sequels than most modern day RPGs is testament to it's popularity. This game is perfect for young children wanting to break free of the harsh reality of homework and vegetables. Commander Keen doesn't eat vegetables, he fries aliens!
