| Game Information |
| Title: |
Home Alone |
|
| Year Released: |
1992 |
| Version Reviews: |
European |
| Genre: |
Platform |
| Max Players: |
1 |
| Game Difficulty: |
Medium
|
| Difficulty Options: |
Yes
|
| Introduction |
| Following the storyline of the movie, you take on the role of Kevin, a young boy who has accidentally been left 'Home Alone' by his family for the holiday season. Kevin has to stop his neighborhood from being ransacked by a pair of bumbling thieves, Harry and Marv, until the police can get to the crime scene. Sound like fun? Read on to find out... |
| Gameplay |
| The aim of the game is to stop 5 houses from being robbed until the police arrive. You have exactly 20 minutes to hold Harry and Marv off in every play through, and there is only the one level. Gameplay switches between riding around the neighborhood on a sledge and fending off the hapless duo inside the houses.
You start your game outside Kevin's mansion sat on your sledge, which you have to awkwardly manoeuvre around the gardens of the neighborhood looking for items to help you on your vigilante mission. This is achieved by knocking snowmen over to reveal tyres (explanation later) and weapon parts. The sled can be made to move faster by pressing down on any of the buttons on the control pad, but your speed burst doesn't last very long and takes an absolute age to charge back up, especially when you're trying to rush to a house that is being looted. Whilst you're sliding around the hood, Marv and Harry are driving around the streets deciding which house to rob first. To get the full effect of the next part of the game, you need to get into a house before the burglars so you can set some traps for them.
Entering a house is a simple task of stopping outside the front or side door. Once you've stopped a message will appear on the screen asking you if you want to enter the house, just select Yes and off you go. Before you actually enter the house though a blueprint of it will appear on your screen. You can use this blueprint to set traps all around the house, many of which are from the movie: blowtorches on doorways, marbles/toys/ice on the floor, etc. Once you are happy with the layout of your traps, press start and the action begins. First off you need to charge around the house looking for weapon parts, some of which are too high to reach. This is where the tyres you collected out in the snow come in to lay. By placing one on the floor beneath an object you can use the tyre as a trampoline, unfortunately you very rarely have enough time in the outside area to collect enough tyres to be able to reach all the objects in the game. Once you have plenty of weapon parts, it's time to build some weapons. Pressing start brings up the weapons menu, where you have to assemble the items to make a weapon, for example, adding together a crossbow, some ballons and a tub of glue gives you a glue rifle. Replace the crossbow with a hairdryer and you get a glue bazooka.
So you've set your traps and you've made your weapons, enter stage right Harry and Marv. All you have to do is hit them with your weapons and fill a 'Pain meter' before they fill a 'Loot meter', very simple once you've got the hang of building weapons. Laying the traps feels like a waste of time as you're normally on a different floor in the house when one of the crooks walks into one. There's also the fact that you don't actually have an energy meter to worry about. If you get grabbed by the burglars they just hang you on a picture hook and carry on with their looting, whilst you toggle the D-Pad left to right to squirm back down again. There's a few other enemies in the house ranging from a cat to a ghost, but as you don't actually have energy to worry about it really doesn't matter if you avoid them or not. In fact they make the game even easier, as when Harry or Marv encounter them it fills the pain meter. Once one of the meters is full (loot full = burglars win the house, pain full = a win for Kevin) the house is over and you,re back out in the 'hood to do it all over again.
And so it continues across five houses for twenty minutes until the police arrive. Yawwwwnnn. |
| Graphics |
| The games graphics are pretty good whilst you are inside a house, everyday objects are easily recognizable and the main characters resemble their movie counterparts enough for you to picture the actual actors. The various painful moments for Harry and Marv are animated nicely and movements are very fluid, I haven't spotted one graphical glitch yet. However, out in the mean streets of the neighborhood things take a turn for the worse. The sled and houses look like they've been put in at the last minute to try and beef the game up a bit, and the rest of the background bits and bats look pretty dire too.
The weapon and trap menus are nicely animated thankfully, and are really easy to use, making planning the crooks downfall more fun than actually acting it out. |
| Sound & Music |
| The music is nothing special, standard plinky plonky tunes that are neither annoying nor memorable. I've literally just played the game and I can't even remember if they bothered to theme it along with music from the movie.
The special effects are pretty good inside the house, with the various projectiles all sounding as you would imagine them to in real life. But as with every other aspect of the sledding round the 'hood part of the game they fail miserably once outside. the sled sounds more like someone sweeping up and just adds to the awfulness of the sled's animation. |
| Controls |
| Basically the controls are crap. Outside the house the sled feels more like a skip. It really is an awful part of the game and feels almost painful by the third play through.
Inside the controls are fine, you press jump and you jump, you press fire and you fire. The main problem is the playing area itself. You can't move across the floorspace, so if you get chased you can't avoid the burglar, all you can do is turn and run.
The trap laying and weapon building menus work really well though thankfully. Both are easy to navigate, and it's actually quite fun building some of the dafter weapons like the flashbulb shotgun. If you start the game on the beginner difficulty setting the weapons menu auto-assembles stuff when you have the parts, but playing on the expert setting means you have to build them yourself. It's worth playing on Expert as you get extra weapons and traps, and it feels more fun when you have to try and work the stuff out for yourself. |
| Reply Value |
| Once you've completed it on Expert, there isn't much to make you want to play again. It's always the same five houses in the same neighborhood, the snowmen and weapon parts are always in the same spots and you always only get 20 minutes to play.
Even going for high scores is pretty pointless, you get the same bonus points for completing a house without any loot being stolen as you do if you lose nearly all of it. And as long as you save every house, which isn't a hard task at all, then you always get the same bonus for completing the game too. |
| Final Scores |
| Gameplay: |
4 |
| Graphics: |
5 |
| Sound: |
5 |
| Controls: |
6 |
| Replay Value: |
1 |
| Conclusion |
| Some parts of the game are quite fun, I especially liked the weapon building aspect. But once you've got past that the rest of the game is pretty abysmal. I could overlook the bad points on the indoor sections if it wasn't for the fact that the outdoor section is totally rubbish.
If you pick it up in a job lot it's worth a quick play before you sell it on (only takes 20 minutes to complete it), but I wouldn't recommend going out of your way to buy it. |
| Screenshots / Images |
![Screenshot: Home_Alone_(U)_[h1]_005.bmp](http://www.sega16bit.com/content/screenshots/Home_Alone_(U)_[h1]_005.bmp)
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