The developers of the game have no excuses for the low quality of that, either. In a blatant rip-off of
Zelda: OOT,
Hercules sends, er, Hercules off on quests of epic proportions. What this really means is that Herc, and occasionally his two friends (one a staff-wielding wimp and the other a bow-slinging chick) have to run around forests flipping switches to open areas.
Read that again and remind me if ancient Greece had switches in the middle of their forests.
The entire game plays like a bad trip. Besides the illogical and pointless switch-flipping, there are the fetch-quests, which have you getting an item in one area, running for five or ten minutes back to a previous area, trading for a new item, and running back. This sort of “gameplay” is Not Fun. And there’s at least one jump in the game that’s near impossible to make, and the route to get back to make it wastes a good minute of your life. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
The only redeeming qualities of the game are the combat scenes, but even those have problems. You can wail on an enemy and watch the hits not register, or you can knock them down with a single hit. I don’t get it. And despite the fact that you can knock down solid rock walls with a few punches, wooden doors bar your way, and you’re incapable of simply knocking the damn things down. The game is full of such inanities.
Herc can get four different types of magic in the game, which is somewhat handy, but I found it more useful for clearing large droves of dogs than for any real important combat. Of course, the potion costs 75 coins, and you’re only going to get 30 or so from the dogs, so there’s no real point to do that either.
I could go on, but I won’t. What little entertainment you can get from Hercules comes from a few of the fight scenes, where you go up against tough odds and beat the crap out of the bad guys. And it’s always fun to throw a dazed warrior at another one, killing them both. And the translation is funny, in a “we’ll outdo Working Designs” sort of way. But is that reason enough to get the game? Guess.