Howard the Duck: Adventure on Volcano Island (Activision, 1986): F.
Quick – what do you get when you take a horrible comic series that was turned into an even worse box-office bomb and then decide to do a videogame tie-in? You get the abomination that is Howard the Duck: Adventure on Volcano Island. Starting with an unskippable cut-scene of Howard doing an 80’s dance on a stage at some club by himself (complete with 80’s staple Moonwalk move), Howard quickly wonders to himself where his friends went – then, prophetically thinks “This does not bode well!” I should have taken this to heart because he was absolutely right; the rest of the game is a disaster. Ostensibly your mission is to recue your friends from the Dark Overlord, who has kidnapped them and taken them to his hideout on Volcano Island. However, no level of difficulty actually ends with you rescuing your friends for some reason. Neither Novice nor Intermediate difficulty levels even give you the chance to face the Dark Overlord, ending abruptly at a predetermined point with no option to continue on. Every level starts the same, with you parachuting onto one island and needing to work your way through subsequent islands. You’re instructed to walk around until you find a backpack containing items that Howard will need for the rest of the mission, a solar-powered jet pack, an ultra light flyer, and a Neutron Disintegrator. Supposedly picking up the backpack activates its “special camouflage mechanism” but what this actually does is never explained and baddies certainly have no problems seeing Howard so why they wasted the ink to mention it in the instruction manual is beyond me. Suitably geared up, you now have to fly over a channel to another island. What, you think because you’re a duck you can go in the water? If you try to set webbed foot in the channel you’re greeted with an “I can’t swim, Einstein!” remark from Howard – like YOU’RE the idiot for thinking a duck could swim! You’re instructed on how to best navigate the channel due to the fact that the current in the channel is strong. Why someone using a jet pack to fly over water would need to be concerned with how fast the current moves is something else that isn’t explained, but I guess if you can accept the fact that you’re a cigar-smoking duck from outer space you just go along with everything else. Once you reach the second island, you’ll come into contact with ‘mutants’ who look like some bastard love child resulting from an unholy union between Eddie Munster and Count Chocula. Again, nothing is really explained about them other than they come out of mounds in the ground and you have to kick or punch them twice to kill them. You can destroy the mound by stomping on it and thus stopping more mutants from coming out, and I strongly recommend this. You see, one of the game play mechanics is that you have to strike a mutant once to make him spin and a second time to finish him off (using your special form of martial arts called Quack Fu). The problem is that they will stop spinning after just a couple of seconds, and if there are more than one of them on the screen they have to ALL be spinning before they can be killed. Given the atrocious controls of the game… hitting, punching, and jumping are all done with the same button… it’s very easy to find yourself with more mutants than you can possibly kill if you don’t finish them off quickly and keep more from emerging. You’ll also find yourself frequently jumping when you’re trying to punch or kick, another source of aggravation. Eventually you’ll come to a bridge, and mutants on the other side throw rocks down at you which you must avoid as you work your way to the other side. Once you reach the other end of the bridge – the game ends. At least if you’re playing Novice. It shows you a medal and that’s all she wrote; you don’t even get a chance to start a new game, you have to literally RELOAD the game from scratch to try again! If you’re playing intermediate or above though, here is where you use your ultra light flyer to try and reach the top of the volcano. Like using the jet pack, you have to navigate thermal winds to make it to the top and it’s a little tricky. Arriving there you parachute down and need to cross another bridge while avoiding holes made by lava falling from the cave ceiling and the Dark Overlord firing energy bolts at you from the far side. If you can get close enough, you can kill him with a few well-placed shots from your Neutron Disintegrator. Apparently at this point you can walk over and flip a switch to ‘turn off’ the volcano by jumping at it and then – the game ends. You never actually rescue your friends, and it’s never explained why you need to turn off the volcano (or how that’s even possible for that matter). The game makes decent use of the Commodore’s graphics and no one can say the source material isn’t… ummm… ‘original’, but this game fails on pretty much every other level. The opening cutscene is too long and annoying to be forced to sit through, the game ends abruptly without letting you play again and the controls will constantly frustrate you. The game is timed, but Howard walks as slowly as a Frenchman on his way to a battlefield. I suppose if you’re one of the half-dozen people on the planet who enjoy Howard the Duck source material you may find some small measure of enjoyment here, but the other 6,890,309,327 of us should steer well clear.
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