{"id":26631,"date":"2026-03-23T00:01:06","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T00:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=26631"},"modified":"2026-03-11T11:20:32","modified_gmt":"2026-03-11T11:20:32","slug":"reader-review-the-newzealand-story-untold-adventure-pc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/23\/reader-review-the-newzealand-story-untold-adventure-pc\/","title":{"rendered":"Reader Review: The NewZealand Story: Untold Adventure (PC)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>When my brothers were very young, I would usually start them off playing video games with classic arcade titles. \u00a0One time I showed my brother Jeff the Taito Legends collection, and he gravitated toward The NewZealand Story, an arcade platformer where you play as a cute kiwi and fire arrows at baddies.\u00a0 The game is notorious for being very challenging, but my brother Jeff was determined to beat it.\u00a0 He got pretty far, way farther than I had patience for, so I admired his determination.\u00a0 He got to a stage in the clouds and when he beat it, an angel said that he made it to heaven and can rest now.\u00a0 And then the game ended!\u00a0 Jeff was so mad that he got a \u2018bad\u2019 ending, but we also laughed about how the game essentially \u2018trolled\u2019 him.\u00a0 We still joke about it to this day!\u00a0 So I thought it was only appropriate for him to review The NewZealand Story: Untold Adventure, an update to the arcade classic for the PC.\u00a0 \u2013Cary Woodham<\/p>\n

Oh no! A giant seal (well, an average or maybe small seal when accounting for the size of the kiwis) has stolen all your kiwi friends! It is up to you to go through each stage and find the missing kiwis, avoiding snails, frogs, penguins that come out of portals riding swans, and much more!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The NewZealand Story: Untold Adventure (I really thought NewZealand was two words in the original) is a fun but super-duper hard side-scrolling platformer sequel to the fun but super-duper hard arcade game from 1988. After a brief intro cutscene of the aforementioned thieving seal, you are thrown into the stage select screen, which is probably the biggest difference between this game and the original aside from the very cute 3D graphical upgrade. Upon starting the first level, you are immediately thrown into gameplay with no tutorial or instructions, which made it quite difficult to figure out how to move and shoot your bow and arrow at enemies. Gameplay is fast and chaotic as you fire at enemies, collect fruits and new weapons, and dodge the hail of projectiles and baddies that the game throws at you. You start with a limited number of lives, but, if you lose them all, it only means you go back to the stage select screen with 3 more lives. This makes it much easier to give tough levels another go, as well as explore already completed levels for secret warps to skip forward levels. Overall, The NewZealand Story: Untold Adventure can be seen as a rather simple game, but is a very fun return to one of my favorite classic arcade titles.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kid Factor:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

For younger players, The NewZealand Story: Untold Adventure can definitely frustrate with its degree of difficulty, but the ability to try stages over again means determined kids can keep trying to rescue all those kiwi birds. Aside from the use of weaponry (bow and arrow, exploding bombs, fireball throwing wands) there is little that could be seen as not “kid-friendly”, as enemies just poof away when defeated.\u00a0 \u2013Jeff Orth<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When my brothers were very young, I would usually start them off playing video games with classic arcade titles. \u00a0One time I showed my brother Jeff the Taito Legends collection, and he gravitated toward The NewZealand Story, an arcade platformer where you play as a cute kiwi and fire arrows at baddies.\u00a0 The game is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":26629,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reader-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26631"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26633,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26631\/revisions\/26633"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}