Lemmings 2: The Tribes – DMA Design/Psygnosis - 1993 - First time playing?: Yes!

In spite of my undying love for Lemmings, I have barely touched Lemmings 2. Why is that? Well, a multitude of reasons, not least of which is that Lemmings 2 was never ported to Mac OS. I attempted the Mega Drive version of Lemmings 2 as a teen, but that version is sadly held back by an awful and absurdly long password save system that’s 264 characters long to track all your progress across all twelve tribes, as well as the fact that I didn’t have the SEGA mouse to play it with. But also, the matter of the fact is that Lemmings 2 is quite the undertaking. It’s a massive, complex game, bigger than its already massive predecessor. Larger levels, more skills, more mechanics, more of everything. Even story! I know you’ve been dying for that in-depth lore explaining why the droopy-nosed dozey dopey ditzes are so damn prone to self destruction. At the time of release, Lemmings 2 was universally acclaimed and considered an improvement upon its predecessor. As time has gone on however, while it’s still considered great, whether or not it lives up to Lemmings 1 is a bit more contested. If you're unfamiliar with Lemmings 1, I highly recommend reading my review of the Mac version of Lemmings first in order to get an idea of the basic Lemmings formula that Lemmings 2 is expanding upon.

The story of Lemmings 1 is “Bloody hell, the dumbass rodents got lost again”, repeated 120 times, once for every single level in the game. Lemmings 2 meanwhile includes a 72 page long lore book inside the box alongside the manual. No, I'm not joking. It's called ‘The Story of the 12 Tribes of Lemming Island… or the day Jimmy McLemming wished he'd stayed in bed.’ The quotes on the back of the book frankly need to be seen to be believed.

So, what is the epic lore of the dumbass green haired twinks? So, Lemmings Island is home to twelve different Lemming tribes, each with their own unique cultures. These are the stereotypically Scottish Highland Tribe, the custard-pie tossing Circus Tribe, the Classic Tribe from Lemmings 1, the surprisingly ahead-of-their-time rock musicians of the Medieval Tribe, the active hikers of the Outdoors Tribe, Queen CleoLemming’s Egyptian Tribe, the laid-back surfer dudes of the Beam Bum Tribe, the athletes of the Sports Tribe, the undercover special operatives of the Shadow Tribe, the CaveLem Tribe who bash each other with clubs as a sign of affection, the futuristic Space Tribe that somehow terraformed a low gravity lunar biome on this island, and the Polar Tribe who, um, like hot baths I think. When the twelve Lemmings tribes first migrated to Lemming Island, the treasure of the Lemmings, the talisman, was broken into twelve pieces and each tribe took one fragment of the talisman with them as they went off to build up their villages across the island.

But now, the idyllic life of the twelve lemming tribes is coming to an end, for the prophesied ‘Great Darkness’ is on the horizon and encroaching on Lemmings Island. What is The Great Darkness? Um, something really bad. I thought it was literal and just meant the sun was going to stop shining on Lemmings Island, but even the Shadow Tribe don't like The Great Darkness despite their home already being shrouded in endless darkness. For that matter, what is the talisman? Um, something really good. Good and powerful. Wow, the 72 pages of Lemmings lore I read really helped clear up some things about this setting’s world building.

Anyway, we have a clear objective aside from just escaping each individual level one by one. All of the lemming tribes have arranged to meet at the center of the island, where an ark will be constructed to escape the island with. The ark can only be powered by the complete reassembled talisman, so unless you can get every tribe to their destination with their talisman piece safely in tow, the entire lemming population is going to be extinct. No pressure.

This all ties nicely into the structure of the game itself. Every tribe is playable from the very start of the game, with each tribe having 10 levels that they're required to get through in order to make it to the meetup spot. Every tribe starts with 60 lemmings and you need to carry them through all of their ten levels with as few casualties as possible. Lose a lemming in level 1 and you now only have 59 lemmings left to beat all following levels with. Yes, there's actual long-term damage to your lemming populations now if you let the rodents die. Fortunately, those lemmings are not lost forever, as you can simply retry the level you lost them in and clear the level without casualties in order to get your lemmings back. Most of the tribes play the same in spite of the aesthetic differences, with the one exception being the Classic Tribe who are restricted to only being able to use mechanics present in Lemmings 1.

As you would expect for a sequel, the skills you can assign lemmings have been expanded upon slightly to prevent the game from simply being an expansion pack. So, instead of eight skills, you now have… fifty one? DMA, you could have stopped at 17 skills and no one would have complained!

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I guess it depends what you want out of a Lemmings game. Lemmings 2 feels more like an upturned toy box as opposed to the more tightly designed puzzling of Lemmings 1. The sheer amount of mechanics you have available to play with is staggering, but I had a good time experimenting with them all and figuring out their practical usages. Your lemmings are now capable of jumping, flying, walking on ceilings, digging diagonally up, digging directly up, using explosive weaponry, building horizontal bridges, building vertical walls, or hell, some of the skills just let you build or dig in absolutely any direction you want. Needless to say, the lemmings have more freedom than ever. After that one level in Lemmings 1 that requires you to dig through the underside of a ceiling by using builders and bombers, it's so cathartic being able to achieve the same result in Lemmings 2 simply by firing a laser cannon at the ceiling and calling it a day.

There's no getting around the fact however that some of these skills are superfluous. Alongside a few skills that only show up a couple of times in the entire time (such as the planter skill which I used a grand total of one time in the entire game,) there's also a lot of repetition with skills that ultimately serve the same function. You have the digger skill which lets you dig straight down from Lemmings 1, but you also have stompers now which… let you dig straight down. The only difference is that stompers are faster than diggers. Likewise, the SuperLem skill and the jetpack skill are also very similar to one another. SuperLem has a lemming turn into Superman and fly through the air for a brief period, following your mouse cursor. The Jetpack skill also has a lemming fly for a brief period, with the difference being that you instead control jetpack lemmings by blowing them in the direction you want them to fly in by using the fan.

“Wait, what fan?” This is another addition to Lemmings 2 that could almost be considered a 52nd skill, although this one affects the mouse cursor as opposed to the Lemmings. By clicking on the fan icon on the HUD, your cursor turns into a fan which will start spinning whenever you hold down the mouse button, causing a gust of air to push away from the mouse cursor. The trajectory of certain lemming skills can be influenced via usage of this fan. For instance, you can give hang-gliding lemmings an updraft by using the fan below them. My favourite use of the fan is in conjunction with the twister skill, which causes a lemming to start rapidly spinning like The Tasmanian Devil, destroying any terrain in their way. By using the fan to push the twister around the level, you can use the skill to dig in any direction you want, allowing you to quickly dig long, winding corridors with a single skill usage.

In general, you have far more hands-on guidance of your lemmings in this game than in its predecessor. Several skills allow you to more or less directly control a lemming via usage of the fan or other methods of mouse control such as SuperLem. Ropers for instance will throw a grappling hook that latches onto whatever terrain your lemming throws it from, creating a tightrope along the way. To use the roper, first you assign a lemming with the skill like usual, but after that you directly control the lemming’s aim with the mouse and click again to fire.

You also have a greater level of control over the level itself. Circus cannons for instance are placed throughout the levels and can be repositioned by clicking on the left and right arrows to the sides of the cannon, and whenever a lemming walks up to the cannon, they’ll light the fuse and launch themselves out of it. Other new level elements of note include trampolines which your lemmings can bounce off of, with the distance of the jump being determined by how close to the center of the trampoline the lemming lands, teleporters that do exactly what they sound like they’d do, and there’s also swinging ropes which… we’ll get to the ropes.

Now, Lemmings was already a bit of a fiddly game, what with how easily you could accidentally select the wrong lemming in a group or how a puzzle solution could fall apart from a poorly timed or placed builder. Lemmings 2 meanwhile almost feels like it's going out of its way to one-up the fiddliness of its predecessor. Nothing better exemplifies this than the archer skill. So, you click on a lemming and then he draws a bow and arrow, and once he's in that readied state you click where you want him to shoot, just like the roper. Arrows jutting out of the wall can be used as platforms for lemmings to walk across or have their fall broken by. Sounds simple? It's not that simple. This isn't just a case of “click where you want the arrow to go.” No, these arrows have physics to account for. If you shoot them too far they'll drop lower than where you aimed. Furthermore, the arrows rotate depending on how far along their trajectory they are, so if you need an arrow to land in its target in a specific angle, that further complicates things. Well, hey, it's not like it's requiring pixel perfect precision for basic puzzle solutions or anything.

Yeah, I lied. This gif is the actual intended solution of this level. You have to do this trick of shooting an arrow with another arrow to make a bridge three times in this level.

The physics in general are given much more attention here than they were in Lemmings 1. Aside from the already mentioned fan physics and arrows, the lemmings themselves also have much more advanced physics as well. Lemmings can get blasted into the air by the recoil of explosive skills for instance, which is something that can be a blessing or a curse depending on the level. Usually, it’s dangerous as it can send lemmings flying off to their demise, but there’s at least one instance where you can use a bazooker to perform a Quake-style rocket jump, which is exactly the kind of creative and unconventional solution I love to see in Lemmings.

Another couple of skills based around physics are the sand pourer and the filler. If you’ve ever played one of those Powder Toy flash games, these two skills behave similarly to those. The sand pourer dumps a bucket of sand out onto the floor, with each individual pixel poured out of the bucket having its own physics, resulting in differing results depending on if you pour it on a flat surface or on a slope. The filler meanwhile pours out a liquid that runs across the floor and doesn’t stop until it hits a wall, after which it solidifies. I’m honestly impressed. The fact that Lemmings 2 is able to not only display dozens of lemming sprites all at once, but also calculate the physics for so many things at once while still running at a consistent framerate on an Amiga 600 is a testament to DMA’s excellent optimisation skills.

Fall damage is also handled slightly differently here compared to Lemmings 1. As opposed to your lemmings instantly splatting if they fall one pixel further than their maximum allowed drop distance, in Lemmings 2 your lemmings can fall a little bit further and survive, with the caveat being that they’ll be briefly stunned from ground shock when they land. Falling from an even greater height will still instantly kill your lemmings however. That stunned landing period actually does end up impacting strategies, as it can either hinder or help you depending on if you need a lemming to get ahead of the crowd as quickly as possible, or if you’re deliberately trying to delay the lemmings. Oh, also, the lemmings say “OWWW!” every single time they get stunned. It gets a little annoying in levels where you’re required to repeatedly stun lemmings. The satisfying ‘boing’ sound effect that plays when a lemming reaches the level exit in Lemmings 1 has also been replaced by a voice clip of the lemming saying “yippee!” which is also more annoying when you’re hearing it in rapid succession, usually fast enough that the escaping lemmings are repeatedly cutting each other off.

So, the physics overall? Pretty fun. Except the arrows. And especially the bloody rope swings. There might be something I’m missing with this mechanic because it feels completely up to chance whether or not the damned thing will work. Throughout levels you will find dangling ropes swinging gently left and right. On the top of them is a weather vane that you can spin by using the fan. The faster the weather vane spins, the further the rope swings left and right. If a mid-air lemming (either falling or jumping) makes contact with the rope, they’ll grab onto the rope and start swinging with it, after which you can click on the button just below the weather vane to tell the lemming to jump off the rope. This requires precise timing to ensure that the rope is swinging towards the lemming at the exact time that they jump or fall into it. How do you time it? Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh… I don’t know. I really do not know. It requires you to start spinning the weather vane far in advance before the lemming is near due to how slowly it builds up speed, but there are so many variables that are in play here that make it near impossible to tell when to start. How quickly will the lemming get there? What direction is the rope gently swinging towards before you start spinning the weather vane? Where is the fan positioned when you spin the weather vane? When should the lemming jump towards the rope to ensure they grab the end of the rope, which is important because if they grab onto the top of the rope they won’t be able to swing far enough to clear the gap? Every time I thought I was getting a handle on it, like I figured out the exact time to start spinning the vane, I’d try it again with what I thought was the same timing and position and it would build up speed at a completely different rate and the lemming would miss it completely. Look at how long this paragraph is and it’s entirely dedicated to trying to figure out how the hell to achieve the basic action of swinging on a bloody rope. Please let me know what an idiot I am if you know the trick for how to reliably perfectly time the rope swings. I want to feel like an idiot when you reveal how simple it actually is.

In spite of a few cruel exceptions such as the rope swings and the previously mentioned archery level, as well as the more complex mechanics, I would say that Lemmings 2 on average is actually quite a bit easier than Lemmings 1, at least in terms of actual puzzles. The levels of Lemmings 2 are much more open ended and easier to take shortcuts in than the tightly designed backroute-proofed levels of Lemmings 1. I still wouldn't recommend starting with Lemmings 2 as it's clearly designed with the expectation that you've played Lemmings 1 before and have a basic understanding of the core mechanics, and as such is lacking in the tutorial stages that Lemmings 1 eased you into the game with. Nonetheless, Lemmings 2 is generally less demanding with things such as multitasking and combining skills. Even more so than Lemmings 1, the majority of levels in Lemmings 2 consist of separating a single trailblazer lemming from the horde and having them build a safe path while the rest of the lemmings stay behind and wait at the start of the level. The execution of pulling off a puzzle solution can sometimes be tougher, requiring more precise timing and positioning than Lemmings 1 as a result of Lemmings 2’s focus on physics, but you’ll typically be able to figure out the solution much faster.

Okay, this level has to be hard. Look at that title. ‘Mortal men doomed to die’ must require some sacrifices with a name like that.

O-oh. Is that it? Yeah, I solved this level immediately 10 seconds after starting it and all I had to do was just immediately dig under a mushroom and call it a day. This isn't a bad thing on its own. After all, the potential for backrouting and sequence breaking in Lemmings 1 is part of what I love about it. The difference is that in Lemmings 1, doing skips like this requires intimate understanding of the eight skills present in that game, how they play off one another and the unconventional usages that they all have. The skips may be faster, but they require far more expertise to pull off, which makes them feel earned. In Lemmings 2 meanwhile, you can often skip entire levels just by using a single skill in a completely conventional and basic way.

A lot of the new skills available to you in Lemmings 2 are also so situational that it ends up being obvious where they're supposed to be used and have very little opportunities for unorthodox and unconventional uses the same way the basic skills of Lemmings 1 did. The pole vaulter skill is one of the worst for this. You need a running start before you can use it, if the pole bumps into any terrain the skill is immediately cancelled, and furthermore you can only vault over platforms at the exact same height as the platform your lemming is standing on. As a result of all of this, the level has to be very blatantly designed around the pole vaulter for it to have any kind of usage. The hopper is similarly situational, causing a lemming to continuously hop forward on one foot until something trips him up. There’s only one usage of the hopper, which is to have a lemming hop across a series of small evenly spaced platforms. Half of the time, a regular jumper will clear the platforms and render the hopper useless.

So, is it a weaker game than Lemmings 1? Not necessarily. It's less tightly designed for sure, but I'd argue that some of Lemmings 2’s gameplay mechanics can be more fun to interact with than in Lemmings 1, owing to the greater deal of control you have both over the lemmings as well as the environments. Lemmings 2 also introduces a variety of quality of life improvements that Lemmings 1 didn't receive until later ports and remakes, such as a fast forward button and a quick restart function, which greatly helps prevent the generally longer and larger levels of Lemmings 2 from dragging on. Regardless though, I do still personally prefer Lemmings 1. Ultimately, that game’s stronger level design and puzzles just do more for me than the whole ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ approach of Lemmings 2. I still greatly enjoyed Lemmings 2 and will happily play it again as it does enough differently from Lemmings 1 to stand on its own. Is it my favourite? No. Is it a good game? Absolutely, albeit an inconsistent one.

Anyway, see you all again in a couple of years when I finally save up enough money for an Amiga 1200 so I can play and review Lemmings 3.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 24th December 2025

Extra note here also; someone my girlfriend was roommates with a couple of years ago is currently struggling due to their house being burned down in a horrible fire. If you are able, please donate at their GoFundMe here or share the link around if you're unable to donate. More information about the situation is here in my recent blog post on the subject. Walker deserves a better Christmas than this!