Stunned enemies can be bypassed until they wake up again, and unlike prior games the blaster does not require collectible ammo, though only one shot can be fired at a time.

He flies to the source, only to discover that the Shikadi from Goodbye, Galaxy, the Bloogs from Aliens Ate My Babysitter, and his "old enemies" the Droidicus—not present in a previous game—have joined forces and are working with his arch-rival Mortimer McMire.

Keen immediately sets off to find the crystals on the three planets linked to the Omegamatic: Droidicus Prime, Shikadi, and Fribbulus Xax.

The Commander Keen series originated in 1990 when John Carmack, then a game programmer at Softdisk, devised a method called adaptive tile refresh to produce smoothly scrolling graphics for a 2D platform video game engine on IBM PC compatible general-purpose computers.

Carmack and a group of his coworkers from Softdisk—including programmer John Romero, designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack—used their tile scrolling technique to make an original trilogy of shareware episodes for publisher Apogee Software.

[2] The game, Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons, was a large success for the market, and led the group to quit their jobs and found id Software.

Further plans were made for another trilogy to be produced in 1992 under the name The Universe is Toast, but before any work began it was canceled due to the success of id's Wolfenstein 3D and development focus on Doom.

IGN, when reporting the statement, mentioned that the idea was not unfeasible, especially given that another 1991 side-scroller, Apogee's Duke Nukem, had just been ported to the same platform.

[6] Activision formally announced at the start of May that a new Commander Keen game had been developed by David A. Palmer Productions, and would be released at the end of the month.

He gave similar criticisms of the music and sound effects' lack of upgrade from the quality of the ten-year-old original games.

[15] GameSpot's Provo termed the difficult gameplay an "acquired taste", and one which was better suited to a system where players could save anywhere, while AllGame's White criticized the size of the levels, which he felt were ill-suited to the small screen of the Game Boy Color and which led to tedious hunting for where to go next.