Home Alone

"Who needs home security systems when you have a hot coal rifle?"

Games based on movies are usually bad. This rule has echoed though the history of gaming sharp and clear like a bell. They are usually rushed and are just a cheap cash in to get people fresh from seeing the movie to buy anything involved with it. Since the name, not the gameplay sells the game movie based games can get away with being crap and still sell.

Home Alone on the Genesis is an expectation to this rule, as it has some imaginative ideas and fun gameplay making it a game worth playing.

Home Alone is based on the 1990 movie of the same name. Kevin (played by Macaulay Culkin is accidentally left alone at home while his entire family travels overseas. After first goofing off he discovers that two robbers, called the Wet Bandits are planning to rob his house. Rather than run away he decided to set traps and try to protect his home from the wood be thieves with a variety of improvised weapons and tricks.

The game is like this but instead of just Kevin's home you have to protect the entire neighbourhood!
There are six houses in the neighbourhood: Kevin's house, the Ultra Modern House, the Colonial House, the Old House and the Country House.

At first the crooks will drive into town in their blue van and you control Kevin on his electrical sled in a top down view where you can hold, down a button to go faster and run into snowmen to pick up items. You sled up to the door of a house to go inside. The crooks will pick a house at random and park in the driveway before going inside and starting to steal things.

In each house there are safes on the wall. The wet bandits will drive their van around town and pick a house to rob. They will then enter the house and start looting the safes. When the “Loot” bar fills up and they have taken all the valuables, they will flood the house, making it impossible to enter.

To stop the crooks stealing everything Kevin must use improvised weapons and traps to hurt the crooks, filling up a “Pain” bar. When the pain bar is full from Kevin's attacks or the crooks getting hurt in other ways they will drop all the loot they have collected and leave the house and go to another one to try to steal everything from that.

The object is to hold the crooks off, making them leave houses and protecting them until the police arrive in twenty minutes. To do this Kevin must make use of things he finds around the houses to create improvised weapons to fight the crooks. These items include wire, snowballs, balloons, glue rubber bands, hot coals, tin cans and other assorted items.

The weapons system is what makes Home Alone fun and different.

Each weapon needs a Base, an Operator and Ammo. For example, to make a Hot Coal Rifle you'd need a crossbow, some wire and some hot coals.

A Pepper Bazooka would need a blow dryer, some balloons and pepper and makes the crooks sneeze. A Snow Ball Launcher needs a ice cream scoop, rubber bands and snowballs and turns the crooks into a snowman for a few seconds.

There are many weapons like various mortars and launchers depending on what the based is. In the easy and normal modes weapons are also assembled when you have the parts, which are randomly placed around the houses but in expert you need to assemble them yourself. The weapons are fun to use and very different from other games. Playing on expert mode also gives access to more weapons. Kevin also always carries his BB Gun and you can find clips for it.

If you enter a house that the crooks are not in you can place traps like blowtorches in doorways or ice or marbles on the floor to help deter the crooks. Each house has its own guard too, like a ghost that electrocutes people in the colonial house or a cat that attacks anyone in the country house, besides the old house; it just has rotten floors to fall though.

The crooks will come after you if you shoot them and pick you up, before hanging you on a nail on the wall like they did to Kevin in the movie and you just mash buttons to get loose. You can't actually die or lose in Home Alone, except if the bandits flood all the houses before the police arrive.

Home alone has good graphics. Each weapon has a different effect on the crooks like the hot coals burning them to the electrical grenade shocking them. Everything is easy to make out and animates smoothly. The frame rate stays constant too.

Sound wise the game is fine. It has some good sound effects and everything sounds like it should. There are no voices at all. Some cries from the crooks might have been good.

The music is fitting and each house has its own track so you get a loud twangy tune in the Country House and a new wave sounding tune in the Modern House.

The game ends after twenty minutes and its different each time as the crooks pick houses randomly and items to make weapons appear randomly as well. More weapons and traps exist on expert mode and you are given a rank depending on how many houses you saved when the police arrive so there is some replay.

At the end of the day Home Alone is a good game. It bucks the trend of movie games being cheap lazy cash ins and its clear alot of thought and some good ideas were expended on it.

Play it today!

Fin.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/14/09

Game Release: Home Alone (US, 1992)