"A Few Tweaks Short of Perfection"

Can Steve Meretzky do no wrong? (Well, okay, maybe 'Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2' was a mistake...) His text adventure games are amongst the finest in the field, and with 'Superhero League of Hoboken,' he has brought a badly-needed dose of humor and creativity to the role-playing genre as well. Actually, 'Hoboken' is a role-playing/adventure game hybrid, with both RPG-style combat and puzzle-solving elements.
There are three main interfaces in the game. One is the overhead map, which is where you stroll around until you reach your various destinations. There's also the adventure gaming screen (easily manipulated with a mouse), and the combat menu. All of it is very user-friendly and highly accessible to those new to either the adventure or role-playing genres of games.
The game, of course, revolves around the exploits of the Superhero League of Hoboken, a rather lowly little faction of do-gooders. But you, as the Crimson Tape, have risen to become leader, and naturally, with a lot of skill and hard work, you can lead your squad back into respectability, and maybe even ascend to become the most mighty superhero squad in the northeast.
To reach such lofty heights, you must solve missions given to you by your base's computer. Each set of missions always includes a run-in with your arch-nemesis, Dr. Entropy, who continues Meretzky's fine tradition of over-the-top bad guys who always do the traditional villainous things (taunting the good guys, always escaping at the last minute) but is self-aware enough to make snide comments about it. With Dr. Entropy and Joey Rottenwood from the 'Spellcasting' series, Meretzky has pretty much satired every stereotypical bad guy trait in gaming and movie history.
All of this leads to this game's strong point, which is a unique sense of humor. Your collection of heros (including RoboMop, who can clean any mess, and the Iron Tummy, who can eat spicy foods without distress) is a silly lot of mutants and other unfortunates who somehow stumbled across their bizarre powers over the course of their lives. Each character has statistics, invididual powers, and can be equipped with weapons and armor, much like in any 'traditional' role-playing game.
Of course, tradition goes out the window once you actually see what sort of weapons you use. Your heros can wield such mighty fare as a pointy stick, a trained doberman, or my personal favorite, a set of arsenic-tipped deer antlers. And armor is done for each individual body part; such as a concrete mortarboard for your head, or some teflon galoshes to keep your feet safe.
As you may have guessed, combat (while certainly dangerous - you can get wiped out in this game just like any other role-playing game) is not especially serious in 'Hoboken.' Rather than straight hack-and-slash action, weapons affect combat statistics only. The actual play-by-play is far more entertaining. While fighting a Cy Young Cyborg, one of your heros might 'charge the mound' for 78 damage, causing a dejected Cy to smash the bat rack and a Gatorade jug on his way out. Or you might make a sound like a lawn mower, doing 23 damage to the Dandelion from Hell. Or... you get the idea. It's much funnier while you're actually playing, and unlike most role-playing games, you begin to look forward to combat, rather than rushing through it to continue the storyline as in many RPGs.
The puzzle elements aren't quite as strong, and if this game has a weakness, it lies in the adventure game half of the equation. The puzzles are clever and often very funny, but they're much too easy, especially considering the fact that Meretzky is capable of much trickier stuff. Maybe he just went easy on us because he had never done a role-playing game before, and he didn't want to hamper the RPG aspect of the game with heinously evil puzzles. Whatever the case may be, die-hard adventure gamers will crush these puzzles with ease, although they'll smile while doing so.
The graphics in 'Superhero League of Hoboken' are pretty solid stuff. The enemies are big and amusing during combat, and each locale has attractive artwork and a lot of things going on in the picture to keep your eyes busy. The overhead map that you walk around on was apparently an accurate model of how the Tri-State area would look after intense flooding and pollution, so such attention to detail is admirable.
The music is pretty catchy, too, especially in the various villages of the game. Wacky sound effects bounce off the walls during combat, keeping with the mood of the game. Everything has a slightly heroic tone to it, like out of a Saturday-morning superhero cartoon.
The game can be played rather handily with the mouse, and both the role-playing and adventure parts of the game are simple to control and move around in. A few minutes into it, and you'll be handling yourself well in no time. A short combat tutorial mission might have been nice for new role-players, though.
One of the main critiques of this game might be that because it combines both an adventure game and a role-playing game, it is really only half of each and won't satisfy either die-hard adventure gamers or hardcore RPG fans. This might be true for the more rigid folks in gaming land, but I doubt Meretzky was attempting to create the world's greatest adventure game and the most amazing RPG at the same time. He probably just wanted to create an enjoyable mix of combat, puzzles, and comedy, and he did so admirably.
I recommend this game to one and all, but I especially endorse it to anyone who has snickered at the general pomposity of some role-playing games, with their grandiose speeches, end-of-the-world plots and convoluted storylines. Games are supposed to be fun; something that Meretzky seems to have a handle on. (Oh, and add this to the small pile of games that never actually spawned a sequel, even though it deserved to.)

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 05/22/00, Updated 05/22/00