"Aaaaagh!"

Home Alone was cute the first time, and it shows in this game based on it (arguably the only good one). As in the movie, young Kevin has been left behind by accident when his family goes to Paris for the holidays. But upon learning that two dopey burglars are robbing every house in the neighborhood while everyone's away on Christmas vacation, Kevin decides, rather than calling the cops with a description of their van, to booby trap his house to make sure its their last robbery.

Kevin didn't leave much time to actually implement his plans before the burglars planned to come, though, and only has an hour (maybe 7 minutes or so of real time) to find stuff to lay traps for them and then lay the traps. After Marv and Harry come, Kevin has to lead them into enough traps (or hit them with his trusty BB gun) to make them decide it isn't worth it anymore and give themselves up.

The burglars have some kind of telepathic awareness of Kevin's location, and will move faster as they get closer to where he is (and consequently be more likely to run right into one of his traps). The idea is to use this to your advantage, to get them fall into your traps as they chase you. This needs to be done without running into any traps yourself, which will break them without doing any damage to the bad guys. Supposedly you can find more ammo for the BB gun if you run out of traps, but I never figured out how.

The graphics are great for an older game like this. The skateboard trap looks just like a skateboard a friend of mine had around the time this game came out. And there's familiar stuff from the movie like the blow torch hung by the kitchen door and the red-hot tongs. They're okay for a 16-bit game and everything is recognizable. So they get the job done, but aren't going to shock you with their realism.

Sound is okay, what with there being an indicative noise whenever Marv or Harry gets hurt and not a lot more. They are just coming from an internal PC speaker, after all.

Replay value is debatable. It'll take two or three tries to get the feel for laying traps and suckering the burglars into them, but once you do get the hang of it there isn't much reason to keep playing. I didn't have any desire to see what the result would be putting a bag of flour over a door to clonk a bad guy instead of a bowling ball or encyclopedia, and you probably won't either.

Home Alone is a surprisingly good game, given the quality of its cousins on other platforms and the general tendency of licensed games to suck. It's not going to be on my top ten list anytime soon, but there's something to appreciate here for fans of the movie, or kids who just want to be the heroes.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/30/04, Updated 05/06/04