Phylox

Phylox is a video game in the action genre developed by Beavis-Soft and published by Precision Software Publishing originally released in 1992. It is currently playable on DOS.

Phylox was one of two games developed by Beavis Soft, a small independent company from the shareware era, before the company became FastTrack Animations.

The creators of Phylox, developed as an action platformer intended to compete with console titles, initially hoped to find distribution through Apogee; however, the appearance of Wolfenstein 3D on the cover of a video game magazine discouraged Beavis Soft from submitting, and they eventually settled on a 'rather dubious publisher', Precision Software Publishing. Beavis Soft's only other game, Wacky Wheels, was picked up by Apogee.

The two levels featured in the shareware version of Phylox were promising, although the game is very clunky. The controls are slow and imprecise, and the platforming level features several enemies that ALWAYS hit you before you can shoot them. Even in the demo, there is a recurring bug in the 'moonwalk', where the sprite faces the wrong direction while walking (even though it shoots in the right direction).

Phylox was almost a 'lost' game. While the shareware version is readily available on various sites, the 'full' version, which promises 'some of the best animated characters you've ever seen' and 'end-of-level guardians . . . as big as you'd see on any of the consoles', was notoriously hard to find until recently.

So does the full version live up to its promises? The second shooting tunnel includes a 'boss' fight, and it's 'big' (it looks like an enlarged version of one of the green aliens in the platforming section), but it's not particularly impressive. The platforming section continues from where you left off, although a possibly game-breaking bug that messes up the grappling hook trigger mid-jump when jumping left makes what should be a difficult jump impossible. The full version saves your progress between stages, so with a lot of patience and practice one might be able to achieve that jump.

On this page, you can download the shareware and the rare full version.

It is possible that we have multiple downloads available when different versions exist.