Hook - Super Nintendo

Review comments

It's a fact of life that, sooner or later, all boys become men. Well most do, except a special few who never grew up - the Lost Boys. These geezers and their leader Peter Pan pursued their adolescent antics on the secluded island of Never-Never Land and enjoyed life to the full...until one day when the evil Captain Hook arrived to press-gang them all as galley slaves and turn the island into a pirate's paradise. Now, since the UN is occupied elsewhere, it is up to Peter Pan to liberate his homeland alone. Landing on the south shore, Pan follows a route through many sectors teeming with Hook's minions. His destination - Hook's ship, where he meets his nemesis for the final showdown. To get there our hero is required to jump around the platform environs of the island, ready to jab Hook's scurvy hordes with his trusty, rusty cutlass in the quest for liberation and eternal youth!

Staff comments

Quality graphics and sound this most certainly has. Challenge gameplay it hasn't. It's just all too easy, and the lack of new things and innovative features means that anyone who's played a couple of platform games before will breeze through this with ease. Given some more interesting bosses, a bit more oomph in the combat department and a few more challenging landscapes to tax your leaping skills, this could have been a winner. It's not, though, and only younger players and beginners will find themselves getting anything out of it.

To be frank, Hook is not an original product. Platform games for the SNES are backlogging at a frightening rate, and, although fun for a while, this hasn't got any features which lift it out of the crowd. To cap it all, it's not really a man's game at all - progress is too rapid. You could find yourself twiddling your thumbs after completing it in not too many days. The bosses would especially be much more entertaining if they were a bit more robust. Most of all, it seems to be severely lacking in the gameplay department. It's a shame to have to say all this, because Hook looks and sounds very nice in places and plays pleasantly. But if it's thrills you're after, leave this as the choice of a younger generation.

Retrospective comments

This is one of only Mean Machines reviews I don't agree with. Personally I loved Hook to bits. The graphics are excellent, the music is catchy and fits the on-screen action perfectly and the gameplay is addictive and fun. Perhaps the MM team let the fact that this was a movie tie-in colour their judgement? Whatever the reason, I think they were too harsh on what is fundamentally an excellent platformer. I've not seen any confirmation of this, but I've always suspected that Hook was programmed by the same Sony Imagesoft team that produced the excellent Sky Blazer (which was released later to almost universal praise). The graphical style is the same and the action is very similar - the 'flight' system seen in Hook is recycled in Sky Blazer.