Hercules The Action Game Walkthrough : Level 9 - Passageways of Eternal Torment

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Hercules "The Action Game" is based on the Disney movie "Hercules", just as the movie is based on the legend...sounds like the recipe for disaster, but to tell you the truth this is a good game - damn good ! It seems Virgin Entertainment managed to deliver great Disney games, as they are also behind games like The Jungle Book and The Lion King, so this one turned out just as good. Hercules follows the movie pretty well: the levels, the enemies and themes are all based on the movie and even some voices are taken right from it, most famously Danny DeVito as Philoctetes - the satyr who follows Herc in the training levels and nags you for making mistakes or wasting time. They even included cutscenes right from the film and they look really good for the time (unlike the Sega CD *cough*) though I wish they would've included more of the 5 muses, particularly the "zero to hero" song, which was the highlight of the whole movie. As Hercules, your job is simple: get from the beginning to the end of each level. Standing in your way are various enemies, traps and even bosses you'll have to fight, like the Centaur, the Cyclops and of course Hades himself at the end. The majority of the levels are standard side-scrolling levels, but there are also 3 third-person auto-scrolling levels, where you can't stop or turn around, so you have to constantly steer Herc around the obstacles and enemies that come at you. You have a lot of attacks to play with: Herc can punch, uppercut, and use a variety of swords which you collect along the way. Controlling Herc is OK, although I do feel a slight slipperiness when trying to steer in mid air after jumping or leaping off a ledge. Other than that, no problems: really easy to move Herc around and beat the sh!t out of everything. The animation on the characters is well done and the levels are well detailed, my favorite in that respect being the Thebes level. Each level has hidden letters that spell the word "HERCULES". They act as the continue feature, so if you find them all you get to try again from the level you died on, rather than having to start from the first level again if you run out of lives. They're usually hidden inside holes in the ground which you uncover up by jumping in place and hitting "down" in mid air where you see cracks. After 3 stomps the ground collapses, revealing a hidden area with goodies and possibly one of the letters too. Speaking of which, other items include the "Herculade" drink which replenishes some of your health, the Hercules action figure which extends your life bar, 3 types of swords (lightning, fire and tornado), an invincibility helmet which prevents taking damage from enemies when equipped and finally urns which represent pieces of the password for the next level - there are 4 of these in each level. Find them all and you'll be given a password once you finish the level. On the PSx you also have the option to save your game after each level, whereas on the PC you have to rely solely on the urn password system, by writing write down the symbols on each of them. I would've liked the game to follow the movie a bit closer as far as the bosses are concerned: in the movie, Hercules kills the Hydra by punching the side of a mountain, causing rocks to collapse onto the monster. You don't get to do this in the game - you just keep slicing off the Hydra's heads until its energy is drained and a boulder drops onto it automatically. Then there's the Cyclops, another disappointing level: you just get to the end of an auto-scrolling level and you get to watch the scene from the movie where Herc beats the Cyclops by throwing a flaming stick into his eye. That was some proper violence for a Disney movie - wouldn't it be more awesome if you got to do that in the game yourself ? The best of all boss fights is the centaur: you get to ride on his back and also punch him in the face at the end, like Herc did in the movie - so satisfying ! Also, although this is REALLY nitpicking now, how about being able to play as other characters, not just Hercules ? I know there's not much they could have done for Meg or Phil in the game, but seeing how they deviated from the legend by having Herc fight the Medusa, they could've improvised something (in greek mythology, Perseus is the one who fights the Medusa, not Herc). For a bit of trivia here, this game came out in 1997; 2 years later, 1999, another Disney game hit the scene, Tarzan The Action Game: it's nearly identical in terms of gameplay to Hercules and it actually has other playable characters thrown in, so we could cut Hercules some slack as far as the characters are concerned, since it came before Tarzan, thus allowing the producers to know what flaws should be ironed over in the future. Other than that, the game is awesome: great graphics, great soundtracks, nice sound effects, smooth controls and most importantly Danny DeVito ! Try it out !