Brad Hates Games

Console:  Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, Arcade

Grade: 

Console versions: D

Arcade version: C

Publisher:  Konami

Year:  1993

Genre:  NRA

I mentioned this briefly when we revoked the Seal of Quality from Lethal Enforcers 2, but playing Lethal Enforcers is like opening a time capsule from the late 1980s.  Technically, the game is from 1992 (in its original arcade form, this version is dated 1993), but you have to consider the amount of time it takes to actually develop a game.  Most of the digitized video was probably filmed in 1990-91.  Nor is it taking into account the fact that the pre-Clinton 90s were basically one long 80s hangover.  So it’s no accident if you start playing this game, see all the boxy cars, grainy video, big hair, and racism towards the Chinese, and think that you’ve warped back in time to 1989 – culturally speaking, ‘89 was like an extended year that went on for 36 months instead of twelve, with Lethal Enforcers coming out somewhere near the end of that.

Looks like a scene out of a straight to video movie starring Brian Bosworth.

The game’s first level is The Bank Heist and takes place, as you probably surmised, at the bank.  Except in this case, it looks like the robbers got confused and instead of robbing a branch, inadvertently invaded the corporate offices.  There are lots of desks and employees in suits, but no counters with teller windows or those little tables with the pens chained to them.  It’s a light gun game, so the gameplay is pretty simple – bad guys pop up on screen and you either you shoot them in the face (if they’re behind cover), or in the testicles (if they’re not).  I guess technically you can shoot them in the chest of the arm or whatever and that still counts, but all the time I’ve spent playing it, or watching others play it, those are the only places anyone has ever aimed for.  At heart, we’re a nation of sadists.

It quickly becomes apparent that this is no ordinary bank robbery (the fact that it was going on in the offices instead of at the branch probably should have tipped you off already), as evidenced by the fact that there is a virtual army of robbers in the bank.  We didn’t make an official count, but I’d estimate that there is somewhere between 50 and 100 bad guys in this first area.  Clearly this is a foreign invasion – probably some Latin American rebel group trying to steal some money to fund their revolutionary efforts back home.  Or maybe it’s a corporate takeover by a competing bank, which would explain why they’re in the office building.  And you probably thought that hostile takeover stuff in the business section was all boring crap with stock brokers and whatnot.

Though there may be a lot of them, the bad guys all look pretty much the same.  There’s a guy in a ski mask, a guy in a suit with sunglasses, and an older guy in a red jacket who looks like he should be strolling to a bowling alley or maybe playing bocce on his front lawn.  These same three guys keep popping out from everywhere.  It’s a lot like the ending of Three Amigos!, except you get to shoot the Amigos in the junk, which is the only way I was really sure I was shooting different guys dressed the same way and not just the same 3 guys over and over.  They wouldn’t be jumping up from behind desks quite so swiftly after the damage I was inflicting on them.

In addition to the bad guys, there are also some civilians trapped in the bank.  Innocents have a bad tendency to jump out from behind desks like the robbers do, but you have to be careful not to shoot them because doing so will cost you a life, and more importantly, a promotion.  Kill enough civilians and at the end of the stage, they will make you do it all over again.  Which seems like an unnecessarily dangerous disciplinary action to bring against an officer who they already knows has a tendency to shoot civvies.

You know what, Lethal Enforcers?  Fuck you.  I just stopped an invading army all by myself armed with only a pistol.  I deserve a goddamn medal, not a lecture about those two bank tellers I shot in a cross-fire.  It’s not like I chased them into a corner and shot them in the back.

This bank was prepared for the inevitability of a takeover-style robbery though, and has taken the precaution of stashing weaponry all over the building.  A Magnum and a shotgun can be obtained, naturally, by shooting them.  Of course, since one shot from your pistol is generally enough to kill anyone (this is a realistic crime simulator after all), the extra firepower isn’t really that helpful.  It does make each shot hit a larger area, though, which is handy for accidentally hitting bystanders.  That might be the reason real cops generally don’t bring 12 gauges to hostage negotiations.

A few stages later, the bad guys make their getaway, in four separate cars, including the epitome of 80s vehicles – an old Camaro.  We can only assume it’s an IROC-Z.  There’s about 4 guys to each car, which sort of makes me wonder if the bank parking lot is still full of now abandoned getaway cars from all the guys we killed inside on the previous stage.  There’s probably about 20 or more cars back there.

The fourth getaway car is a cargo van with a sliding door.  If you’ve ever played a game like this before, you already know what that means – there’s a guy with a rocket launcher inside.  Sure enough, that door slides open to reveal another business suit an sunglasses man, this time armed with an RPG and about 10,000 rockets.  Between the number of guys involved in this robbery and the amount of expensive weaponry being used in it, it’s hard to imagine anyone ever stealing enough money to cover the costs.  Maybe this is more about making a statement or something.  Fortunately for you, rockets are easier to shoot out of mid-air than bullets, so he’s actually easier to defeat than you average bad guy, even if he does show amazing resilience to being blasted in the face repeatedly.

The next stage takes place in Chinatown, but without light guns, this game is impossibly hard and we didn’t get very far.  I’d really love to know who the hell traded in a copy of both Lethal Enforcers games to Stryker’s store and decided to hang on to the guns.  Hope whoever it was enjoyed those other few Genesis games that were made for them.

The only way this could get any more racist would be if that Chinese chef was chasing an alley cat with the kitchen knife in hand.

Is it really fair to judge the console versions of Lethal Enforcers without the guns?  While we’ve usually punished games for not using the standard controllers (see: just about every fighting game on the Genesis that required the 6 button pad), we’d be more willing to cut Lethal Enforcers a break since it came with the gun controller.  But more to the point – yes, it is fair.  We’ve played the home version without guns, and we’ve played the arcade version with guns, and our brain can kind of conceptualize what playing the console version with guns would probably be like.

Lethal Enforcers isn’t anything special. It’s basically Duck Hunt with three guys in different outfits standing in for the ducks.  And believe it or not, shooting the same crappy video of a guy with a gun over and over gets old pretty fast.  So long, Lethal Enforcers, or as one of the the poorly recorded audio clips from the game might say, “Eat lead!”

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Brad: Last week we had Rampart, a game that really did hit the arcades in 1990 before coming over to the Genesis a year later, but looked and played as though it had been created several years before.  This week we have Flicky, an actual, honest-to-goodness arcade game from the early 80s that, for reasons mankind may never fully understand, Sega decided to port over to the Genesis.  In 1991.

It’s hard to know why anyone thought this was a good idea.  Flicky was an arcade game in Japan only, so it’s not like there was a big nostalgia factor.  And it wasn’t miraculously ahead of its time, either – its simple, repetitive, and loses its appeal after a few minutes.  Which is fine if I’m dropping a quarter into it to amuse myself in between games of Spy Hunter and Rampage.  For a Genesis game, this is a bit disappointing.

Flicky is a pretty simple concept – you run around an apartment collecting chicks (baby birds – this game wasn’t made by EA in one of their more panderific moments, like say, Normy’s Beach Babe-O-Rama), and leading them in a conga line to the door before you are eaten by a cat.  It’s sort of like Mappy, but since nobody’s ever played that, a more relate-able example might be Pac-Man, except the dots follow you and you have to jump to higher platforms.  Hmm, that’s not a great example either.  You know what Flicky is really like?  It’s like the song “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight” – it’s not that great but somehow keeps ending up on Best of Genesis anthologies (oh c’mon, we’ve been doing the project for a year now – you had to know it was only a matter of time before we broke down and made this kind of a joke).

As it is, if I had paid $50 for the Genesis version when it first came out, I’d be pretty mad.  In fact, even paying $4 today to buy it at a a used game store seems a bit like a rip-off, which probably explains why Stryker never managed to sell either of the copies of the game that got traded in.

Stryker: Well, i still say its because you kept scaring off my customers with your non-stop chattering about how somebody should make a Jason and the Argonauts game.  But anyway…  Flicky’s big problem is that there isn’t much reason to keep playing for more than 10 minutes.  The levels don’t change that much, and you get the same enemy on every level, until you reach level 10, at which point, you’ll be up against the same TWO enemies for the rest of the game.  Once you’ve gotten that far you’ve pretty much seen everything Flicky has to offer.  Well, unless finding out what color the background is on each level is enough to keep you coming back for more.

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Brad: Hmmm, that’s funny – I specifically remember this game NOT sucking back in 1993.  Was I on drugs?  Had I suffered some kind of head trauma?  Or had endless exposure to Aerosmith’s “Cryin’” video warped my mind to the point where I began to think anything on TV that wasn’t an Aerosmith video was automatically the greatest thing ever – regardless of whether it was a movie, a tv show, Mutant League Football or even just a Sprite commercial starring Kris Kross (a yo Kris/What up dawg/What’s that in your hand?/It’s the S to the P to the R-I-T-E can)?

Tell me this doesn’t look like an NFL Europe Broadcast

No, I think our standards for football games were probably just a lot lower back then.  Mutant League Football is based on the Madden ’93 engine, which was only the third console game in the history of that series (sorry children, Madden ’92 is NOT actually the first Madden game.  EA released a game simply called John Madden Football the year before – and the PC version of the series dates back even further than that).  At the time, the concept of a football video game that kinda sorta resembled actual football was still pretty novel.  Especially for those of us who grew up playing games where Dan Marino threw 80 yard passes all the time and that Bo Jackson had never been tackled in his entire career.  But the Madden series still had a long way to go – in those early years, there were more than a few plays that worked almost every time, the players ran around like the field was covered in ice, and a lot of the on-field action (like whether or not you got through a block, caught a pass, or broke a tackle) seemed to be determined mainly by how much the computer liked you that day.

Still, the worst part of those early Madden games – and Mutant League Football – were the passing windows.  Admittedly, it was a decent idea, and the programming to make it work is pretty darn impressive, at least for back then.  But in execution, they were awful.  For those of you not familiar, let me explain – by pressing the C button when the quarterback had the ball, three small picture-in-picture type windows would appear at the top of the screen showing you each of your eligible receivers.  In theory, this should have allowed you to see which of them were open and throw them the ball.  But in practice, the windows were so small that the player took up almost the entire space.  While this was very helpful in checking to make sure your players still exist, you couldn’t really see enough to know if an opposing player was nearby.  Oddly enough, the windows would actually pop up right over the portion of the field where the receivers were 90% of the time, so you probably had a better chance of seeing them before they appeared.  Luckily, it only two EA another two years to figure that out, and by Madden ’95 the passing windows were gone in favor of an unobstructed view.

Receievers B and C look open.  Except for the defenders standing just outside the window.

Even from just a pure marketing perspective, you have to wonder about the strategy of making two different games based off the Madden engine.  How did EA think this was going to work out?  Essentially, you just end up competing against yourself.  The only way you’re not is if you truly believe that there’s a burgeoning market of people looking to buy two football games a year, yet somehow wouldn’t be more interested in either a college game or one made by a different company.  Either that, or you’re trying to pass off Mutant League as a football game for people who don’t like football, which means attempting to sell a product specifically to people who don’t like said product.  This is an even more impossible approach, as evidenced by the failure of every book store ever opened in Ohio.

So yeah, what you have with Mutant League Football is a very early version of Madden where some of the players are skeletons or aliens and the guys kill each other.  Like Madden ’93, it was good for its time, but it’s pretty damn brutal to play now.  Who knows?  Maybe if a new one had come out every year we could have seen a nice gradual evolution, and by Mutant League ’96 or so, we’d have something that was still fun to play even today.  Alas, we’re left with a game that’s close, but just not quite good enough to crack our Top 100.

Stryker: I love, love, love the idea of MLF – a arcade-style football game where you can win just as easily by killing enemy players as you can by scoring touchdowns.  But basing it off the same engine as the most realistic football game at the time is counter-productive.  Even with all the carnage, trick plays, and fewer on-field players, MLF still plays too much like real football, and if I’m going to do that, I might as well just play Madden.  Nobody comes into a game like this hoping for “3 yards and a cloud of gore” NFC-style power football.

Liability Insurance must cost these teams a fortune.

Mr. Do!: Skeletons that bleed when you hit them?  Did they not understand the concept of a skeleton or something?

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Brad: One thing that has consistently been a source of shame for me over the last 20 years is that I don’t really know how to do the Humpty Dance.  This was particularly frustrating because about a third of the song is dedicated solely to giving you instructions on how to do it.  Worse yet, the other two thirds were mostly about how awesome the dance itself was, which only served to make me want to master it more.  This, I assumed, would be the key to me becoming able to get busy in a Burger King bathroom.  But even with the prospect of unlimited lavatory sex in fast food restaurants hovering just out of reach, I still couldn’t get the hang of it.  If you pay attention to some of the lines from the song though, it’s not hard to figure out what the problem is.  For example:

It’s supposed to look like a fit or a convulsion

You look like MC Hammer on crack, Humpty

No two people will do it the same / You got it down when you appear to be in pain

Think about that – the “no two people will do it the same” part is pretty much an acknowledgment that there really isn’t a Humpty Dance at all – notice he’s not saying no two people will do it exactly the same, it’s more like nobody is doing the same thing at all.  Just do whatever you want and call it the Humpty-Hump.  The rest of the descriptions make it sound like you just get on the dance floor and start spazzing out, then once people begin holding you down and trying to keep you from swallowing your own tongue, you’re doing it right.  It’s supposed to look like a convulsion?  I was under the impression that how you dance is supposed to be an indication of how you are in bed – I heard that in a Will Smith movie, so it must be true.  If that’s the case, then the Humpty Dance seems like a trick to scare all the women away from you and into the arms of the non-Humpty Dancing members of the Digital Underground.  So yeah, thanks Humpty, but I didn’t really need instructions on how to dance like a white person.  Kinda knew that one already.

In Brad’s mind, this has something to do with the Humpty Dance.

The point is, the Humpty Dance actually isn’t a very good dance at all.  You just think it is because throughout the song he keeps telling you how great it is.  What the hell does this have to do with Rocket Knight Adventures?  Well, it’s the same idea – I had never played RKA before doing this project, but I assumed it was good, because everyone kept telling me it was.  And when I first started playing it, I already believed them.  But after a while I came to realize that it really wasn’t anything special.  That’s not to say that its bad, just kind of average, and the sequel does pretty much everything better.

Stryker: We’re not very big on sequels here, so for more than one entry from the same series to make the Top 100, both have to really amazing.  And that’s just for normal games.  For two games starring an opossum knight with rocket powered armor to make the list… well, science has not advanced enough yet to be able to calculate just how awesome both of those games would have to be.  We’ll drop this one and grant a Seal of Quality to its successor.

Mr. Do!: This game kinda sucked, but I will always remember it for helping me discover that there’s a Wikipedia category for “Fictional opossums”.

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I know there are some of you out there who are probably surprised, if not upset, that we would dare eliminate Herzog Zwei today.  Or at least there would be if they were anyone out there following this project.  “But Brad,” these fictional readers would say, “you can’t deny a Seal of Quality to Herzog Zwei!  It was the first Real Time Strategy game ever made.  It’s historically important!”  Then, since all our readers are fictional, they would ride off on their unicorns while proving once and for all the infallibility of supply-side economics.  And yes, these fictional readers have a point – Herzog Zwei is historically significant in the history of gaming.  And you know what else?  The Wright Brothers’ plane is historically significant is terms of flight history.  You still wouldn’t want to fly that deathtrap from New York to Los Angeles.  I think there’s a point somewhere in that example that I was trying to make, but screw it – it’s late and I’m almost out of cookie cake.

Well, the menu screen is certainly… utilitarian.

I will admit that Herzog Zwei is an amazing achievement for its time.  But it’s also an RTS missing a lot of key features that we take for granted in these types of games. Like being able to issue commands to your units after you’ve deployed them.  Or controls that are even remotely intuitive.  Or a map that you can see while playing the game.  You know, things that would help make it what those of us who write about games for a living like to call “functional”, or in layman’s terms, “not a pain in the ass to play”.

“But Brad,” those fictional readers from the first paragraph will say after coming back from a Buffalo Bills Super Bowl parade, “it was 1990.  Those things hadn’t been thought of yet.”  Well guess what?  It’s not 1990 now.  A lot of the old Genesis games from those days held up pretty well and are still fun to play even now.  Herzog Zwei isn’t one of them.  The point of this project isn’t to make a list of the 100 best Genesis games for their time.  It’s to make the list of the best Genesis games right now.  Why?  Because Stryker and I don’t have a time machine, and even if we did, we probably wouldn’t go back to the early 90s anyway.  Knowing what the best games of 1990 were isn’t that helpful to you, me, or any of our imaginary readers.  We’d much rather know which Genesis games are still worth dusting off once in a while, and which ones are better left in a cardboard box in some forgotten corner of the attic of Stryker’s parent’s house next to the Atari 2600.  And once you’re almost 15 years out from when they stopped making games for the system, the risk of these rankings changing gets to be pretty low.

A tactical map might have been handy before I stumbled into the enemy base.

Even so, you can’t say Herzog Zwei’s influence isn’t still felt today.  It was the first Real Time Strategy game ever made.  It’s also the first one to show us that RTS games don’t really work on a console.  Almost 20 years later, that rule is still as true now as it was back then.

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Brad: Well, I think we can safely eliminate this one under the same logic that we knocked off Ms. Pac-Man, Double Dragon, and all those other arcade classics – because it came out way before the Genesis did, it’s not really fair to call this a “true” 16-bit game.

Stryker: Actually, it came out in 1990.  The Genesis version came out a year later, and it was one of the first home systems that it came out on.

Brad: Wait, are we talking about the same game?  Rampart?

Stryker: Yep.

Brad: You’re kidding, right?  This looks and plays like it should be crammed in between Missile Command and Defender in some dark arcade while “Invisible Touch” plays in the background.

Stryker: Nope.  It came out in the same year as Super Mario Bros. 3.

Brad: This game?  The one with single screen that never moves, painfully simplistic gameplay, and graphics that look an Atari?

Stryker: Yes…

Brad: …Came out after Spy Hunter, Final Fight, Castlevania…

Stryker:  …and Gauntlet and Rampage. Yes.

Brad: You’re trying to tell me that – chronologically, at least – Rampart closer to Vanilla Ice than it is Loverboy?

Stryker: Yes.

Brad: How?  How could that even happen?  Was it completed and then lost in a warehouse for 8 years?  Did it fall into a wormhole and transport itself to the future?  Were the people who made it part of some experiment where they were isolated from the rest of society and tricked into thinking it was still the early 80s?  I mean, were they trapped in some compound with no news of the outside world, forced to wear shredded jeans and ringer tees, and the TV just played a loop of Knight Rider and Family Ties reruns?  Were they kept there until the game was complete?

Stryker: I don’t believe so.  I’m pretty sure the developers just thought this was consistent with gamers’ expectations and standards at the time.

Brad: Wait, are you SURE we’re talking about the same game?

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Rolling Thunder 2 is a decent game that plays similarly to Shinobi or Sunset Riders.  It’s fun in a “This game’s ok, but not really fun enough to put on the Top 100, plus we already too many games like this” sort of way.  What really makes it interesting though is that the original arcade version was released in 1990,  which means that the “80s Hangover” that you see in so many games, TV shows and movies released around that time is in full effect here.

Playing Rolling Thunder 2 feels kind of like opening a time capsule from the late 80s.  So while the game isn’t good enough the keep its Seal of Quality, we still couldn’t just throw away so much nostalgic goodness without at least sharing a bunch of screenshots with you:

Brad: I have to admit, being assigned a partner codenamed “Albatross” doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence about this mission.

Stryker: Nice tux, though.  The pink shirt is a particularly inspired choice.

Brad: It looks like the end of every 80s show – just freeze this frame, cue the theme song, and and roll credits!

Stryker: I think he’s supposed to be looking at her, but it seems more like he’s fixated on that one hair sticking out over his forehead.  Seriously, are you Razor Ramon?

Brad: I can’t help but wonder if this was a mistranslation – like the Japanese development team asked some producer in the US about different American criminal organizations, he mentioned the Black Panthers, and then they took it literally.

Stryker: That explanation only works if there’s also a gang I don’t know about called the Stone Pussy Eaters.  Seriously, what’s going on in the corner there?

Brad: Actually… if they were taking everything literally and there was such a thing, that guy would be eating an cat made of stone.  Oddly enough, I think this is the only context I’ve ever seen in which that would actually be less disturbing than what’s already going on.

Brad: Albatross, what happened to that snazzy tux?  I’m disappointed.  And what’s she pointing at?

Stryker: It’s the 80′s, right?  Probably some used hypodermic needles on the beach.  Did that problem ever get fixed, or did people just stop talking about it?

Brad: I’m assuming it fell out of vogue so people assumed it had been fixed.  You know, like the rainforest.

Brad: You walk around Miami, get into gunfights constantly, and everyone’s trying to kill you.  It’s like the developer had a premonition and decided to make a Burn Notice game 15 years before the show came out.   Why someone would do such a thing is beyond my comprehension.

Stryker: Rolling Thunder: Vice City.

Brad: This is the music test screen.  I have no idea what the fuck is supposed to be going on, and it kind of scares me.

Stryker: I suppose no 80′s nostalgia would be complete without a tribute to Showbiz Pizza Place.

Brad: If I was friends with G. Gordon Liddy, I’m guessing he’d send me postcards that looked like this whenever he went on vacation.

Stryker: Dear Brad, Having a “Blast” with the ladies in Miami!  Wish you were here.  Also, socialism is killing Free America.  Yours,  GGL

Brad: Oh, Albatross – ha, ha, ha!  But seriously, this is why nobody ever invites us to parties in the first place, you lunatic.

Stryker: I’m trying to decide if a “Bring Your Own Bullets” party is better or worse than one where the host provides the bullets for the guests.  I think I’ll just stay home, actually.

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Blades of Vengeance – If you’re going to make a game this bad, you may want to keep the word “Vengeance” out of the title.  No sense putting ideas into your customer’s heads.

Cross-Fire – I think this picture says it all:

Caliber .50 – Hey I know!  Let’s take Ikari Warriors ‘ barely passable concept for a game and add the worst control scheme in history to it!

Tecmo Super NBA – In the Super NBA, your most effective offensive strategy appears to be the “Just shoot it from anywhere and grab the rebound for an easy score” approach.

El Viento – Maybe my Spanish is a little bit rusty, but I don’t remember Viento being the word for “Mediocre”.

Wardner – Do you know why this game never shows up in classic Genesis collections?  Because it kind of sucks, that’s why.

Alien Storm – If humans are capable of inflicting Alien Storm on each other, I’m inclined to let the aliens conquer us.  Things can only get better.

Atomic Runner – Seems pretty original until you see through the “running” facade and realize this is just another horizontal shooter.  This should take about 4 seconds.

Micro Machines – A game that lets you race toy cars over table tops, the kitchen floor, and in the bathtub.  You know, because we’d never have a chance to do that in real life.

Mercs – A little tip on pacing for aspiring game designers – once you have the player shoot down a Harrier jet single-handedly with a rifle in the first five minutes of the game, merely blowing up tanks on the second level is going to feel relatively anti-climatic.

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Brad: Way back in the first few days of this project, when we eliminated tons of games in the lightning round, both Street Fighter games got thrown out because they were games requiring six buttons, on a system where the controller only had three. The changes that were made from the arcade versions in order to get them to work on the Genesis ultimately ruined the experience. The Mortal Kombat games should be in a similar dilemma, having 5 buttons in the arcade, but don’t suffer as much in their transition to Genesis. This would seem to be a good thing, but what does that ultimately say about the game?

My point is that if a fighting game is any good, you shouldn’t be able to just get rid of one attack button entirely, and assign blocking to the start button where it will never get used, without messing up the gameplay. But it’s not a problem in Mortal Kombat, because the fighting is so shallow – as long as you can jump kick, leg sweep and uppercut, you’ll be just fine.

Stryker: In the back of our minds, I think we all kinda knew that the gameplay in Mortal Kombat was terrible, but we played them anyway and convinced ourselves that they were awesome so we could see all the blood and fatalities. The farther away we get from when they were first released, the more and more obvious that fact becomes. You could almost picture the two guys who came up with Mortal Kombat sitting back smugly and saying “See? I told you teenage boys will play anything if you put enough blood and gore in it.”

Mr. Do!: Or boobs.

Brad: I think what’s most damning about the whole Mortal Kombat series is our rationale for getting rid of Mortal Kombat II today, while keeping the original around a bit longer. MK2 has slightly refined gameplay, more characters, and more moves. It is, technically, a better game. But Mortal Kombat had much, much cooler fatalities, and even though they are completely superfluous, it really is the only part of this lame-ass series that we, or anyone else, ever really cared about. Back in the day, we probably would have convinced ourselves that MK2 was the better game, because to admit otherwise would be acknowledging that we really only played them for the explicit violence. Today we’re coming clean, and admitting that as teenagers, we were knuckleheads. Mortal Kombat II is out.

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Brad: Humans is kind of unique in that it’s a squad-based puzzle game.  You have a team of 4 little cavemen that you have to guide through each stage, using their abilities to overcome obstacles placed within each level.  It sounds fun, and there was a lot of potential.  But, with the aid of this screenshot, I will attempt to explain where it all went horribly, horribly wrong:

What you’re seeing in this picture is two cavemen who have used their spears to pole vault over the gap, throwing the spears back to the other two so they can do it, too.  Usually if a puzzle game like this gives you a team of 4 guys, they want you to use all four together to do one thing as a team, not just repeat the same thing individually four times.

But what makes it all the worse is that this is only one of several gaps in the stage.  So not only do you have to do this 4 times to get past this gap, but then you’ll have to do it another four times at the next one, and four more times after that.

Oh, but it gets even better!  Later stages will introduce new obstacles, but all the ones you’ve solved on previous levels keep showing up, too.  So the “pole vault over the pit 4 times” trap keeps showing up over and over.  You’ll be doing it on level 2, you’ll be doing it on level 50, and you’ll be doing it on almost every level in between.  Sound like fun?

Stryker: I kept playing through Humans expecting that at some point, it would stop feeling like a tutorial, give me some interesting puzzles, and not keep making me repeat the same process four times for each minor obstacle.  And while it did get a teensy bit better as the game progressed (and there are some pretty challenging puzzles later on), it remained far too repetitive for my tastes.  And repeating the same basic hazards on level after level would be inexcusable for any puzzle game, let alone one that already requires you to solve said puzzles 4 times in the first place.

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