Publisher: Namco
Developer: ITE
# of Players: 1
Category: Classics/Puzzles
Release Dates
N Amer - 04/25/2005
HUGO - The Evil Mirror Review
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Poor Hugo, here he is sitting down to dinner with
his family when the local bully, a witch named Scylla busts down his door,
traps him in an evil mirror and then proceeds to break it in three pieces.
Scylla, for no other reason then to be difficult then takes the pieces and
scatters them in three distinct locations. Now it's up to Hugo's three
children to find the pieces and free their father.
Hugo: the Evil Mirror is a puzzle game, albeit a
repetitive puzzle game. The game features 60 levels of gameplay broken into
the three varying areas. As each one of the children play their corresponding
areas, they will eventually reach the end, fight a boss and recover 1/3 of
their imprisoned father, yay! But to put it in such simple terms would not be
doing you, the reader (and maybe the player) any justice. For if we are to
review this game thoroughly, then some questions need to be asked.
First, why is Hugo trapped in a mirror? The
game's opening cutscene shows the villainess Scylla smacking poor Hugo over
the head with this mirror, but instead of it breaking, Hugo goes into its
reflection like he would enter water. But back to my question, has Hugo done
something to offend Scylla? Is she so evil that she must knock down any old
random door, find the family patriarch and seal him into a magic mirror? My
point is, the game gives us no reason why this act of evil is occurring. No
back story, no explanation, just evil maniacal laughing and WHAM! Hugo's
trapped. Now, I did a little research, and it seems that Hugo is a very
popular character from the Netherlands. So popular in fact that Namco felt he
was worth importing and releasing here in the U.S. And even though the game
gives us no reason for Hugo's predicament, I liken it to, if we were playing a
Batman game, and in the opening scene, the Joker flung open a door and began
firing madly at Batman. Sure, as pop culture tells us, the Joker is Batman's
arch enemy, it's almost ingrained into our society and a scene that would
surprise no one. So I must accept that in Denmark, this opening scene was
just another in a series of run-ins that Hugo has had with Scylla.
Next, Hugo children each travel to a different
area to retrieve 1/3 of Dad. But why on earth would anyone, and in this game
it's the Beavers, the squirrels and the Vikings, want a piece of a broken
mirror with only 1/3 of a troll in its reflection (yes, Hugo is a troll).
Would you like 1/3 of a couch to go with your mirror Mr. Fjord? Now being
familiar with woodland creatures, I would expect this sort of poor thinking on
squirrels, but beavers AND Vikings? I mean beavers are nature's engineers,
always building dams and infuriating crop growers! And Vikings, don't get me
started on Vikings, we all know they are smart, building boats to sail to
Valhalla on and Thor, the thunder god, what a guy! Stupid squirrels. So
other then using it as a plot device to move things along, there is no real
reason given to why anyone would want a piece of a broken mirror.
The gameplay is fairly simple. Hugo's kids battle
their enemies by freezing them, and then either jumping on the frozen slabs,
or pushing them off a ledge. When an enemy is defeated it leaves behind some
goodies for you to pick up, coins, powerups, etc. Or, since the game is
puzzle like, you can stack up the frozen slabs to access areas you cannot jump
to. Admittedly there is some strategy put forth here and it should be
mentioned that if you do not do anything to the frozen bad guys, they will
thaw and continue after you. Now, putting more thought into the gameplay
rather then the story, you can pick up frozen bad guys and merge them together
to form really big slabs of ice. When that is done, usually a very large
monster will break out of the ice and come after you, you then must defeat
this monster by shooting it with your ice gun again, only this time it will
finally croak. Again with the questions... why would you want to make a giant
monster, so it would come after you? Well, only by creating and then
destroying these giant monsters will you be able to get the really good power
ups that the game offers. Things like extended range on your ice gun,
armor to take more abuse or running shoes so you can move faster. Not an
entirely bad twist in the gameplay.
So as you go further and further into the game,
the bad guys get tougher as they now throw spears at you, have shields for
protection against your ice guns and so on. There is also the constant threat
of the monster generators that are pumping out bad guys. They too need to be
frozen up in order to move forward in the game.
Now with all this nifty gameplay, you would think
this game was the bee's knees. But it isn't. The game has some pretty poor
sprite based graphics that are just not as tight as they could be. And I know
this because I've seen other GBA games. The goofy little dance that the
trolls do when they complete certain parts of the game gets real old to look
at and the incredibly similar look and play of the three different worlds just
tells me that they didn't put the graphical effort into the game that they
should have. The characters, have a poor look to them and if the game manual
had said that the squirrels were wild jungle men, I wouldn't have known the
difference.
The same could be said of the game's thin music.
There is literally no sort of animated noises coming out of the game
characters during in game action and the music loop that plays does nothing
for the game. The little "disco" tune that plays when you end a level
probably made me laugh more then anything. And somehow I don't think that was
the game's intention.
Gameplay: 7.0
Some neat ideas here with the freezing and
stacking of badguys. Gives the game an added depth and helps with the overall
strategy of the game. Some of those later levels do get tough and will test
your mettle.
Graphics: 5.1
Not good, the game is heavily pixilated and looks
dated. When the game zooms in on the trolls, you know you are playing a game
that needed some help in the eye candy dept. The little cut scenes are a bit
better but don't last long and I'm for certain eat up allot of the cartridges
memory.
Sound: 4.5
Can you ABBA? The Swedish supergroup should get
some royalties for that five second long disco number that the game kicks
out. Disco is dead, the rest of the noise that this game spews forth sounds
bad and listens worse.
Difficulty: Easy/Medium
It's not a tough game for anyone over eight. I
gave it to my son and he gets stuck every once and a while, and he's four.
The puzzles do get harder as the game advances but not as hard as figuring out
how to save this game when you want to take a break. Not that it matters, I
think you could beat this game in under five hours.
Concept: 7.4
I like the idea of creating more powerful monsters
so you can destroy them for the more powerful power-ups. And I liked the
stacking and combining of the ice blocks. What I didn't like was the
paper-thin story behind the game and the idea they used to drive it. I also
don't like squirrels with spears.
Overall: 6.6
My kid likes it, and so that helps a bit, my wife
likes it too, because it is not a tough game. But for all the things I don't
like about it, there is something that I do. If you love puzzle style games
or games with an 80's arcade feel to them then you may have something here.
Otherwise, I'd say take a pass.
