Commander Keen: Goodbye Galaxy Review

Harken back to days of yesteryear when the ancestor of Doomguy would strap on his trust helmet and run, jump, climb trees, blast aliens with his laser blaster and, generally, have a pretty interesting time.

Hunker down here for a second. We’ve got a little history lessons here. By the way, Keen’s real name is Billy Blaze, but I’m going to call him Keen.

Goodbye Galaxy contains the fifth and sixth entries in the Keen series. Though the fourth and fifth would also be correct as one of the previous entries “Keen In Dreams” isn’t part of the continuity. Keen, 8 years old, is here in the Shadowlands to rescue the Gnosticenes to see if they can tell him how the Shikadi are planning on destroying the galaxy and then attempting to put a stop to said plan.

It’s, essentially, a continuation of the story from the previous entries.

High art this is not, friends.

This is an action platformer with some adventure aspects. Stages aren’t exactly linear. You travel a world map, enter a stage, complete the stage and do it all over again in a new area. Nothing terribly complicated here.

As I try and do in these reviews we’ll take ourselves back to 1991 and look at the game graphically and check out the audio.

This is a dos game that would have shown up on a couple of floppy disks. Maybe. This could have fit on one disk I’m almost positive.

I’m going to call the graphics “simple”. But I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s got a cartoony vibe which is totally intentional. The sprites aren’t super detailed, or detailed at all really. But Keen looks good and so do the enemies. This may not make a lot of sense but while there’s not a ton of variety here in the game, there’s enough to keep it interesting. Different areas, enemy sets, etc. There’s a good enough bag to grab from, but you’ll be grabbing from the bad pretty frequently.

The music in Keen is ok. It’s, again, simple. Not bad but simple. “You’ve Got To Eat Your Vegetables” will always be a banger. I don’t care who you are. But the tunes are basic bleeps and bloops. Not bad. You won’t hate it. You may not love it.

As this is a Keen game before I wrap up I wanna talk about its development a little bit.

Goodbye Galaxy didn’t sell as well as the first 3 entries in the series. Mostly because of the weird shareware model that Apogee (the publisher) decided on for some of these games. The shareware version of the game did very well, only outperformed by Wolfenstein 3d, but did about a third of the sales from the previous entries.

iD software was behind this, as I’m sure you know, and it’s a Hall of Fame of developers here. Tom Hall designer, John Carmack and John Romero programmed, Robert Prince composer. The same group that, basically after this game came out, all went over to work on this new Doom project.

And speaking of Doom and Wolfenstein…

BJ Blazkowiczk, the hero of Wolfenstein, had a son named Arthur. Sometime after the war, BJ had his last name changed to Blaze.

Arthur Blaze wasn’t really a stand out kind of guy. But he had three children. His middle son, Billy, would go on to do some pretty impressive things. Having an IQ of about 315 according to game lore.

After all of Billy’s adventures into defeating aliens and trying to save the world he became very shaken by all the pain and literal death he was causing. So he swapped out his death ray for a stun ray and refused to take a life ever again.

A couple of centuries later Billy’s great-great-grandson signed up with the space marines. That space marine, at the time, was most known for giving their commanding office a good fragging when they ordered their unit to fire on civilians. That space marine would later be named Doomguy, or later on The Doom Slayer.