Disney's Hercules

Disney's Hercules Action Game is a bright, colorful platforming hack-&-slash that is loads more fun than any licensed release ought to be. The same development team would go on to make Disney's Tarzan, which utilizes many of the same gameplay mechanics and features, though Hercules seems to implement them better.

Throughout the course of the game, you play as Hercules, re-enacting much-lengthened scenes from the original film with movie cutscenes interspersed between levels. The game's visuals are predominantly 2D sprite based with a bit of pre-rendered 3D and a few 3D models. Much of it is gorgeous animation-quality work, but it's meant for a very low native-resolution; full-screen on any modern monitor will show the game's age. Still, it's beautiful, high-frame-count stuff, and the “drawn” backgrounds are vastly superior looking to Tarzan's rendered environments.

What the game does best is make Hercules feel mighty. He's armed with his trusty sword, which is good for hacking and slashing and has a number of elemental powers it can acquire via certain power-ups, such as fire or lightning. Herc also has big punches, can to lift giant objects, leap great distances and even smash the ground beneath him. Combine all that with the ability to eat up a good bit of damage before he goes down, you have a Hercules that feels super when you play him. The smooth and responsive controls don't hurt, either.

The levels are big and long. Like the later Tarzan game, each stage is more of an endurance trial than a bag of cheap platforming tricks designed to keep you from winning. The 2.5 D portions of levels, though, are one of the game's weak points. Most of the time, you're moving on a single plane, but sometimes the game will mix it up a bit with two or more layers of planes. This isn't a big problem, but the hidden items and enemies obscured by background objects are a nuisance. More noticeable is that they slow the pace with fiddling up and down the transition paths between planes and interrupt the otherwise quick flow of the game.

Overall, I like Hercules a lot. I wish that it had a save system instead of passwords (and that it was easier to obtain the passwords; you have to find 4 secret items in each level to get its password); a save file would make Hercules more conducive to casually playing a few levels at a time. While that's not a huge strike against it, some might find it irritating.

Review By P. Alexander