Herc's Adventures

"Surprisingly challenge, though technically and graphically lacking"

Herc's Adventures in an interesting mid-Playstation era adventure game. Though lacking impressive graphics or particularly deep gameplay, the game gets creative with its source material and achieves quite a bit within its technical limitations. The end result is a long and surprisingly challenging experience. This is not a game for the casual, uncommitted gamer, despite its cartoon-ish appearance and quirky humor. It was released around the same time as Disney's Hercules game (based on their movie), possibly to capitalize on the latter's publicity, but Herc's Adventures has easily turned out to be the more endurable title.

The game's visual style is unique and consistent. Major characters are presented as larger than life. Hercules is a brawny, neck-less beefcake, Jason a saucy whipcord youth, and Atlanta a sinewy graceful warrior. These three are the selectable heroes you can play as. The pantheon of Greek gods are depicted as robust (read: fat) caricatures, with nothing grand or deific about them. Rather, they provide some much needed comic relief, both in their appearance and demeanor. I especially like Dionysus as a drunken German party boy. This offsets the genuinely menacing portrayal of the game's primary enemies, the various bosses you fight as the adventure progresses, though there are a couple of exceptions, such as the Hydra, which within the confines of this game would have been difficult to portray well. A good-looking 7-headed serpent/dragon would be a challenging character to draw and animate, so the game settles for 4 heads and a round body with two feet. All in all, the game presents a distinctive look, and does not remotely resemble Disney's game.

Unfortunately, despite its unique visual style, the graphic quality is poor. Not to the point of being outright ugly, but the game's age definitely shows. The characters are highly pixelated, and their animation has an extremely low frame rate. The terrain is, for the most part, identical across the whole of the game world, so that one glancing at the game at various points might think that no progress has been made by the player. There are some exceptions to this rule, such as the icy north lands, but the majority of the game uses identical rocky plateaus, muddy paths, mountainsides and beaches. In addition, the graphics present some perspective problems, meaning that the perception of depth is poorly achieved. The suggestion is of a 3D world, but the reality is a bizarre 2D approximation. In other words, you're supposed to be moving deeper into the screen when you jump up to a ledge deeper into the mountainside, but it looks like you're just moving straight up into the air along the same vertical plane.

The player quickly adapts to this failing, however, and it becomes largely a non-issue for most of the game, as there is an awful lot of moving in and out of the game screen. This brings us to an aspect of the gameplay, namely locomotion throughout the game world. Being ancient Greece, there are no vehicles at your disposal, so you must travel across a vast terrain on foot. The paths are pretty well-defined, leaving little doubt about the road you're meant to take. At the same time, most routes are rather roundabout, with zigzagging paths up and down mountains or winding through forests. All of this travel could get tedious, but the inclusion of various types of enemies at different positions, mixing of terrains (mud, grass, water to swim through) breaks up the monotony. Also, for most of the game you're breaking new ground, going to previously untraveled areas. Even when your exploration leads to dead-ends, there are usually weapons or items to collect there. Towards the end of the game, however, you end up walking back and forth over the same area repeatedly, and it's not a short walk either, but this is my only complaint about the layout of the land. And despite its overall linearity, there are plenty of side areas and optional excursions for you to explore, some of them yielding the best items in the game.

And no matter where you go in the game world, combat is plentiful. Fighting takes place real-time. You have a lot of variability and options for how you fight. Each character has a normal attack, which for Herc and Jason consists of a melee hit, and for Atlanta an arrow shot. So right there you get a lot of variety, based on which character you pick to play with. There are also close to 20 different secondary weapons to collect and use. These are as varied as spears, bombs, snowballs, fire breath, lightning bolts and ray guns (yeah, I know ray guns don't belong in ancient Greece, just roll with it). These weapons are consumable, so you have to pick up lots throughout your travels. Part of succeeding in the game involves figuring out which weapons are most effective against which enemies in which situations, and which you need to save up for later encounters.

There are several boss fights at various intervals throughout the game, and these are fairly creative. Many are fairly authentic mythological beings: Hercules' giant boar, the Hydra, Cerberus, etc. Each fight is unique, requiring completely different strategies. Some bosses take damage like a normal enemy (i.e. every hit does a little bit of harm), while others are only damaged under certain conditions. Some you will need to quest for specific weapons in order to defeat them. Some are fairly goofy-looking, while others appear quite menacing. All provide memorable battles.

Sound and music in this game are average. The in-game music is pleasant and sets an adventurous tone. The music shifts as you move through different areas, providing for example a tenser atmosphere as you approach a boss battle. Voices are of poorer quality, however. Many characters sound like they have marbles in their mouths. At times you have to listen carefully when you meet the gods and they tell you what you need to do next, lest you be left wandering aimlessly. The playable characters also stop and toss out a line now and then, but these are often kind of incomprehensible. So audio-wise, the game is a mixed bag.

Much of the dialogue is meant to be comical. In fact, the game is ostensibly laced with goofy humor. To some extent, it is successful in this regard, but overall I wouldn't say it was more than just mildly amusing. There were no laugh out loud moments to speak of. But for a game that tries to be humorous, Herc's Adventures is really quite challenging. Lots and lots of enemies continually wear down your health, and it is difficult to avoid damage completely. In addition, healing items (which in this game take the form of greek gyro sandwiches) are somewhat rare. And save points are even rarer, and you must purchase saves with gold coins. Sure, there are a couple of healing pools around the world, generally not very conveniently placed, and you can die a few times and fight your way through the underworld to come back to life fully healed, but these features don't even come close to making the game anything approaching easy. Length is also an issue, at least on your first play-through. There's a lot of terrain to cover and a lot of side ventures required to complete the main quests. All in all, the game takes a good deal of patience and dedication to complete.

One feature that really sets Herc's Adventures apart is its 2-player cooperative mode. There aren't many Playstation games that offer this feature. Of course, playing in this mode would require both players to be present for the entire game, so it is best reserved for playing with siblings or close neighbours. If you have the time and the person to do it with, I highly recommend trying the game in this mode, provided that you and your partner can be genuinely cooperative, sharing pickups equally and working well together towards a common goal.

So overall, Herc's Adventures is quite a unique Playstation offering. Though not technically innovative, the simple gameplay concept that leads to a long and challenging adventure provides for quite a bit of fun. This fun might diminish at some point if you find yourself having difficulty progressing in the game, but with a bit of persistence the rewards are great. The game takes fairly creative license with the source material based on ancient Greek mythology, but this provides much of the mild humor in the game. And in addition to the challenging 1-player game, the cooperative 2-player mode creates a stand-out experience. If you can look past the grainy graphics and give it a chance, Herc's Adventures turns out to be a fairly challenging and entertaining game.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 02/21/06