YMMV / Lemmings

• Anti-Climax Boss: The final level of the original game, "Rendezvous at the Mountain" is way easier than the level right before it, "Save Me".
• Awesome Music: Many of the music tracks, Tim 1, Tim 2, and a few others.
• Breather Level: Lemmings, to its credit, was good about sticking an easy level here and there to break up all the murderously hard ones you run into as you get deeper into the game. That said, it's still a puzzle how the extremely non-challenging "Highland Fling" ended up in the middle of the Havoc levels in Oh No! More Lemmings.
• Contested Sequel:
  • Lemmings Chronicles added a number of new features to the game, including platforming elements, actual enemies and rewind/fast-forward options. It wasn't well received and sold poorly; its story arc was subsequently abandoned and most of its gameplay changes were removed for future games in the series.
  • Lemmings 2: The Tribes also suffers from a divided fan reception. It's either an Even Better Sequel that expanded upon everything started in the original Lemmings to create the best game in the series, or its additions made the game a cluttered and confusing mess. Whether you prefer Lemmings 1 or 2 typically comes down to if you'd rather have a simple yet tightly designed and balanced game, or a deeper and more varied, yet somewhat less focused game.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • The Fun levels and the first half of Tricky have a relatively gentle curve where you normally have 20 of every skill and just have to endure more and more complicated layouts, something a novice can generally get through without too many problems. Once you hit Tricky 15 though, the difficulty climbs very quickly, as you are introduced to levels that require precision bombing (without the aid of Blockers) and lateral thinking.
  • The first 20 levels of Oh No! More Lemmings are painfully easy and can be solved with minimal effort. Once you get out of the Tame difficulty setting, however, the game instantly becomes Nintendo Hard and doesn't let up until you've finished.
  • In Lemmings 2: The Tribes, generally, the ten levels of each tribe gradually increase in difficulty. However, for some reason, the game designers saw fit to make the painfully hard "Snow More Lems" the third level of the Polar Tribe.
• First Installment Wins: The original game is the only one that enjoys widespread availability today.
• Fridge Brilliance: The mobile game's Excuse Plot mainly involved terraforming various planets for Lemming habitation, something which the Lemmings were apparently very good at considering how dramatic the changes could be. Who would've seen the vulnerable little wimps as skilled terraformers? Someone who has realized that a large part of the gameplay involves building stairs, digging tunnels, and otherwise transforming impassable environments into much more passable ones. The Lemmings were skilled terraformers all along!
• Genius Bonus: One level in Lemmings 2: The Tribes has the title "22934", a number that has no obvious significance to the level. All skills in the level are available in quantities of 1 (written "01" in-game) or 10, and putting them together makes a binary number that translates to 22934.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The "splatting distance" (the height from which Lemmings will die if they fall) was increased very slightly in the DOS CD-ROM version. While this made little difference in most levels, this small tweak was enough for the lemmings to be able to walk safely off the ledge in the "We all fall down" levels, meaning that the player could beat these extremely annoying levels essentially without having to do anything. (The bug would eventually be fixed in later pressings of the game.)
  • There are many less obvious bugs, the most well known being one that lets you break through the edges of normally indestructible steel walls to a small extent. While usually insignificant, this bug alone makes it possible to achieve 100% on Taxing 6 "Compression Method 1". Another one, involving lemmings flying upwards through solid ground, makes it possible to complete Tricky 28 "Lost Something", a level where the exit is buried under solid ground, by only using builders!
  • In Lemmings Revolution, you can save a bomber by assigning a harmless task like basher right before they blow up. This trick also let you get rid of a blocker, allowing you to save extra lemmings.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: All of the Tame levels for some. They are extremely easy to solve and there are no traps or hazards to kill the Lemmings (unless you go out of your way to kill them). In a sense it's easier than the original's Fun rating (and less fun too).
• Memetic Mutation: the "Oh No!" sound effect of a lemming blowing up.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Oh No! More Lemmings. The "Tame" difficulty would more aptly have been called "Lame", since those levels are just a simple stroll from start to exit and you can't kill any lemmings unless you go out of your way to do so, but the "Crazy" levels which follow are roughly equivalent to "Taxing" in the original.
• Song Association: Fittingly for the studio that would go on to make GTA, Lemmings uses a lot of old out-of-copyright tunes ("Ten Green Bottles", "London Bridge is Falling Down", etc.) that will now forever be associated with the game.
• Surprise Difficulty: Those cute critters are stuck in mind-bending puzzles that will leave you scratching your head.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The opening riff of the shadow tribe theme in Lemmings 2: The Tribes sounds like the theme to Mission: Impossible.
• That One Level: Quite a few, apparently; it has its own page.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The whole story with Tribes (and, in The Feelies, Jimmy McLemming), which was abandoned after Chronicles sold poorly.
• Woobie Species: The Lemmings themselves, as it's not their fault they're Too Dumb to Live, and the only reason they don't go extinct is due to your own assistance. Even then, you sometimes have no choice but to kill or write off some Lemmings to save the rest.