Chuck Rock

"Picture a mostly hairless ape with a potato for a head and you have Chuck Rock, the ugliest mascot EVER..."

If you STILL don't believe me when this review is said and through, then read my review for the Gameboy version of Chuck Rock. This entire franchise's crappiness will become a little more clear to you.

I think one of the biggest problems with this game is the fact that you play as an extremely ugly roadkill-for-a-face main character who is completely hopeless. This game could have had great level design, music, original game concepts, whatever...but it would always be condemned due to the terminal status of the character Chuck Rock himself.

For starters, you hit enemies with your stomach...it might SOUND easy, but in execution it isn't really. It took me a couple dosages of repetitious fast death to finally catch on to the timing -- and complete stupidity -- of this stomach manuever. What makes things even better (sarcasm here of course) is that half the enemies in the levels are much higher up than your stomach, therefore rendering the move completely useless.
But all is not in vain -- the developers give your caveman a kick function, for when you press jump and attack at the same time....the only problem is that Chuck has stubs for feet, so the range and accuracy of this move is extremely limited. You live longer when you run away from these types of enemies. On top of that, I'm not even going to get into the completely unfair heaping amounts of boulders and rocks that shower down upon Chuck that can't really be avoided...trying to dodge them becomes nothing more than an exercise in frustration.
The music was EXTREMELY repetitive and just all around "blah", and the graphics were mediocre at best. Of course, they only helped our friend Chuck look even worse than he already did -- just picture an ape with a potato for a head and you're thinking along the right lines.

It all boils down to this : Games like Chuck Rock don't have to be revolutionary (and god knows that this one certainly isn't) -- as long as the gameplay is solid and bareable, people will play through almost anything. Sadly, Chuck Rock falls far short of the "solid" and "bareable" mark and therefore this eliminates about 98% of Chuck Rock's gameplaying audience. "What about the other 2%?", you may ask. Well,those are people with potatoes for heads.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 06/03/04