"Dr. Green" is a retro game inspired 2D platformer for the PC.  This game starts up with a doctor witnessing the birth of his son but only for him to abandon his son in the forest shortly after due to not being able to handle raising a child.  The child ends up being just fine as he is rescued and raised by nature and grows up to be a healthy young man named "Dr. Green".  On one fine day we see that the forest is under attack by construction men that are hell bent on taking down the forest to put up some buildings owned by an evil corporation.  Dr. Green becomes hell bent on saving the forest from this evil force to protect his friends, family, and home.  How is Dr. Green going to battle this evil force?  With a gun of coarse.  Join Dr. Green as he runs, jumps, and shoots his way across forest and city alike to put an end to this evil and save his home.  (Click "Read More" to read the full review). 


The story in this game is your typical "Tarzan of the Apes (1914)" kind of story where you have an abandoned child raised in the wild.  The developer did add in his own take to this flavor and it was alright.  Sadly some of the dialogue written during the prelude of the was a bit forced as it tried to force a dark moment onto you.  There are cut-scenes that happen in-between certain levels and they worked  as they helped progress the story and they were also fun to watch.  One thing I found incredibly weird about this game was that even though this is a game that's sending an environmental message it does seem weird that you are doing it by blowing up lumberjacks with your gun...  But I think that I'm just over thinking that as I'm sure this is meant to be a game where you don't need to think about anything other than enjoying the gameplay.

Gameplay is very simple as all you are doing is running and jumping across levels while blasting at baddies that come in your way.  You also can collect weird nut/berry looking things throughout each level and these items give you points and I do like that there's a scoring system in this game as it gives me incentive to replay the game to see if I can beat my high score.  Not only do you collect weird nut/berry things but you can also rescue animals that are trapped in cages that appear in certain spots on each level.  The animals in this game also help you by recovering one hit point.


Your character has three health points and every enemy attack will take away one hit point and when you die that's it unless you have any spare continues.  Lucky for you as you start off with a few of them and when you do continue it sends you to the start of the last checkpoint you were at.  Levels in this game are pretty big and are made up of several segments.  Once you reach the end of the level you have to battle a boss that involves either a lumberjack, machinery, maybe something more scary, or a mixture of all three.  The boss battles can be very tricky to beat at first but each boss has their own pattern and once you've nailed that down you can beat them with ease.

Difficulty in this game isn't bad as it is very beatable but the only thing that makes this game difficult is that you have to beat it all on one sitting and it gets even more frustrating when you lose all continues as you'll have to start again from the beginning.  Once you've got this game mastered you will find this game to be fairly short.  This game also has a good amount of replay value and not for just one reason either as you'll want to replay this to see if you can get better, trying to beat your or a friend's score, or just because you enjoy playing this game (I'm all three). 


I have come across a few bugs in this game by rare chance and they broke the game...  In a good and funny way that is.  This one time I walked into spikes (which are instant death mind you) and instead of facing my doom I became immortal instead until I got to the boss.  The other weird glitch was during one time when I got to the second boss.  I walked into the boss stage as normal but instead of dropping down into the boss I instead spawn on top of the stage with no way to get down.  I did eventually drop down into the right part of the game but I also weirdly warped into the boss and died instantly.  These glitches only happened to me once though and I just thought it would've been a funny thing to mention.

Controls are simple as you use "A" and "D" to go left and right, "L" to jump and hitting "L" while in mid-air will cause you to perform a double-jump, and "K" is to shoot.  This control set-up was fairly comfortable to use but you can change them if you don't like them.  The controls are very tight and responsive and that's a very important thing to have in these kinds of games (well no kidding).  I do have one complaint about the controls and that's the lack of a pause button.  There have been times in this game where I have needed to move away from the game for a minute and can't leave this game unattended due to either enemies on screen or the level timer being low.  I did try pressing every button but nope as nothing happened and so I tried pressing "Esc" to see if anything happened but all that does is quit the game in an instant.


Graphics in this game uses a retro handheld style that makes it look like it was made for the "Game Boy Color (1998)" and it works well and makes me want to see this ported to the Game Boy Color.  Level designs in this game are pretty good as everything in the levels were well placed and the levels were very fun to explore as well.  Characters have a comical look to them and I liked it as seeing the lumberjacks did give me a good laugh.  Soundtrack is very good and works well with each stage plus some of them were very catchy to where some tracks are very memorable. 

Overall this was a very basic but quite fun game.  I mainly recommend this game to people that grew up on Nintendo games and especially to those that grew up with the Game Boy.  Fun run 'n gun (try saying that three times really fast).

Game: Dr. Green
System: PC
Developer/Publisher: Johan Aronsson
Genre: Action, Adventure, Platformer, Run 'n Gun
Price: $2.99 (Steam)
Recommended: Yes